Subject Matter Experts (SME’s)? There seems to be a presumption on the part of Data Governance – and the broad IT community – that SME’s exist in the business. Sticking with data, the expectation is that there will always be SME’s who can explain data to the degree required for

Let’s try to do some Philosophy of Data Quality! Is data quality to be assessed relative to the purpose of data? To consider this question we need to understand the concept of “scientism”. It was defined by F. A. Hayek in his book The Counter-Revolution of Science as follows:

The Data Quality dimension of Accuracy vs. Philosophy. Entities have attributes. Some are intrinsic, e.g. my eye color. But many “attributes” are extrinsic, like my Customer Lifetime Value to McDonalds (probably not much). This distinction was explored by the UK philosopher Peter

I want to share the newest episode from "The Rock Bottom Data Feed" Podcast where we dive deep into Principles and Policies. Thank you John Ladley and Mark Cooper for having me! Hopefully you will enjoy our conversation. I’d love to hear your thoughts, drop a comment or send me

Data Decisions vs. Data Catalogs. The “passive” metadata approach of limiting the use of data catalogs to harvesting structural metadata from database environments seems to be a common pattern. Yet after 10 years of data catalogs we still see data decisions being done in an ad

Is Data Governance Kafkaesque? Well, sometimes it seems so. Here is one example. DG formulates its own workplans internally and comes up with a set of projects. Then it sends out random requests to other organizational units asking for things ,or telling them to do something. The

Zero Governance but Observed! Who needs July 4th when July 3rd is “National Compliment Your Mirror Day”. I do not celebrate it, but I am interested in its origins, as it seems to capture the Zeitgeist. Alas, it is not possible to track down who created it, but somehow it is

How old is data? It seems to be pretty old, predating systems of writing. One example is The Lebombo Bone found in a cave in the border region between South Africa and Eswatini (formerly Swaziland). This fibula of a baboon is 45,000 years old and has notches that make it look

Is NULL inherently confusing? It would seem so as it can represent many different things, including: - A data value is currently unknown, but might be known in the future, - Something is missing in the real world, such that we cannot record a data value now or in the future. -

Is Data Quality in a bubble? Of course, we understand that DQ issues can affect business operations and decision-making. But, at the meta-level – the theory and practice of DQ – it seems we think of it purely in terms of Data Governance and Data Management professionals as

Data Policy Format Is Important! Suppose we have a data asset like a table that is out of compliance with a data policy. Well, what exact point in the policy is the table out of compliance with? If the policy is a giant blob of text, then it might be quite difficult to point to

Emotion and Metadata? Apparently, they can mix, and not in a good way. Walter A. Shewhart gives an example in the quote below where the inclusion of “Best” in the name of a data element can produce an unjustified emotive response in a reader who is not fully informed. Maybe

Data Privacy Gone Wild? I recently noticed messages about personal information being removed automatically from files. As the post in the image below highlights the decision of our Tech Overlords to add yet another click to our “experiences” with their products is annoying. But

Data Product Owner – Upside vs Downside? What is the upside to being tagged as a Data Product Owner? I mean to the individual so tagged, not to the collective good of the enterprise. As for the downside, it seems to be more work for the individual. This includes: keeping

Are Data Governance processes less governed than the data and processes they seek to govern? Some examples of what some DG units do: ·      Metadata in Excel spreadsheets, manually maintained, with dozens of tabs, complex formulas, and metadata repeated across different

Bad Result of Non-Awareness of Data. At breakfast yesterday my old container of coffee ran out, so I opened the new one I had recently bought in the same microlocation in the same Costco store where I had bought the previous one. I became dimly aware the new one was smaller than

A New Frontier in The Neglected Governance of Unstructured Data? Does this argument work: (a) AI feeds on unstructured data (b) Humans produce unstructured data (c) A decision or action begins the process to document it, which may be some time after the decision or action. (d)

Data / Politics / Trigger Warning! The past week has seen some polemics here in the USA with the BLS Commissioner losing her job over data issues. Yes, sadly politics is involved, but there are deeper data issues too. The data in question is the so-called Establishment Survey

Data Product Owner vs. Data Product Consumer? There seems to be a lot of emphasis on the former but not on the latter. My worry is that this ends up like the old Pub/Sub architecture (Publish/Subscribe) which was a server people put datasets on so anyone could pick them up and

Are There Emotional Dimensions of Data Quality? Maybe, but nobody seems to talk about them. Let’s try a thought experiment. You work in Sales and monitor a monthly revenue report. Halfway down the page, you see that the figures for the South-East region show a sudden 70% drop —