Category: Data Quality

Has your ability to manage risk scaled with your systems?

Funny thing about large data systems, everyone knows the benefits scale due to the application of technology, but many companies turn a blind eye to the fact that so do the risks. Complacency and arrogance (C&A) team up to teach us occasional lessons to learn from, and if the screw-up in grand enough it may [...]

Data Ownership vs. Data Stewardship

Over the last several years, there has been quite a bit of discussion regarding the distinction between data ownership and data stewardship. Stewardship commonly involves the daily and routine care-taking of all aspects of data systems. The roles are highly distributed. Ownership on the other hand is more concentrated. If you want to find the [...]

Data Steward and Data Custodian Definitions

Of all the posts on my blog, the one that draws the most interest is my humorous story about the definition of data steward and data custodian. Commonly, people find it while looking for a good definition and list of responsibilities for a data steward or data custodian. The following is being posted to help [...]

Confusing What’s Urgent with What’s Important

Recently an acquaintance summed up data governance as “trying to do what is important, while be sidetracked by what is urgent.” To me this was an interesting observation, because it sums up a paradox associated with data governance. Resolving urgent data quality issues uses so many resources, there are often none left to implement the [...]

Key Date-Time Stamps and Why They Matter

Have you ever considered how important the mundane time-stamp is to your BI operations? Think about it, every report includes the element of time in it. The report is a snapshot in time, or covers a range of time. Accurate and timely business intelligence requires good records of the history within your business processes. The [...]

Practical Data Governance – Getting to Action

Four Steps to Action Two things many of my readers are searching for are a good definition for data steward, and a practical path to actionable data governance. This entry addresses the latter. While there is no silver bullet, here are four steps you can take after you get your senior management support.

Where to Govern Data – Control Points in Information Flows

My last entry suggested that data governance is not a new problem. While exploring data governance, we are revisiting the issues encountered as society built out roads, and developed modern manufacturing processes. The only difference is what we are governing this time is data content instead of a physical thing. With that in mind, it [...]

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