We speak to current and potential clients regularly about the critical role data stewards play in data governance: developing policies, enforcing standards, guaranteeing data quality and legibility,...
Aaron Walker
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It’s football season, and if you watch games, you’ve probably seen something like this. It’s fourth down, deep in your opponent's territory. Should you go for it? Should you attempt a field goal? How...
We recently recorded a few webinars focused on data quality, specifically how data quality management--whatever that looks like at your organization--fits into data intelligence activities and a data...
We attended an industry event recently, and during the meet and greet portion we got to talking about what we do. The minute we mentioned "data governance," the response was something like: "you mean...
Nearly everyone, it seems, understands that organizations perform better when they make evidence-based and data-informed decisions. A data-driven or data-enabled culture is essential for improving...
For many, many years now, part of the prevailing business discourse has been that data-driven or data-enabled companies and organizations outperform their peers and competitors. Why is that? In...
When we introduced the Data Cookbook, one of our goals was to help clients solve a problem they all had with requesting and providing data. We observed that users who wanted data would describe the...
We were recently reintroduced to the "5 Whys" concept, which we first learned of many years ago as part of Lean Six Sigma training. When it's appropriate, it can be an elegant and useful tool to...
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Clients often come to us for data governance assistance after they have migrated to a major new software solution, or after they have deployed significant upgrades to their BI stack (a new warehouse,...
We described the concept and the value of a data catalog in this space recently, and made an arbitrary distinction between cataloging data assets--the actual data elements themselves and the systems...
It seems like every day we're hearing about data products, or data as a product. The terms have certainly crept into our vocabulary and we have the distinct impression we're using them more often....
Let us be among the first to wish you a happy new year. Here's hoping it's productive and rewarding. As with many organizations, we are spending a little time, at the end of last year and the...
One reason we don't get as much out of our data as we could is that we don't trust it. In this blog post we will cover why we don't trust our data. We will also discuss a single source of truth and...
Your organization faces numerous challenges as it makes its way towards analytics maturity. We are deliberately using that phrase loosely, since what that maturity looks like for your organization...
We found ourselves at a trade show last week, and we were amazed as usual by the variety and creativity of software and solutions available. We found ourselves near a company that among other things...
Recently we discussed the concept of data sprawl. We find ourselves very much in the era of data sprawl, with so much data available for capture, so many specialized tools for its collection and...
As long as the notion of big data has been around, we have known that organizations of all sizes are exposed to more data, more quickly, across more systems and platforms. (These are the three Vs:...
Recently we were working with a client and it came to us after much discussion that the right name for the key problems they were facing was something that should be called "data friction." In the...
The big day last week in the United States was Independence Day, July 4th, and we hope everyone was able to enjoy it in their own way. The first week of July is often significant and occasionally...
Many years ago we worked with a person whose default position on a surprisingly large variety of issues and tasks came down to something like, "If you don't do things this way, the IRS can fine our...
In this space last year we devoted a number of posts to how organizations can better understand data literacy among their employees, what sorts of data literacy competencies already exist, what sorts...
A decade or so ago, when we would introduce the Data Cookbook as a product an organization might be interested in, we generally had to make the case for data governance first, before demonstrating...
We were recently reminded of #MonkeyFirst, which was something between a thought experiment and an analogy produced by Astro Teller of Google X. Briefly, for those of you who missed it the first time...
As data practitioners, we assume that even the most skilled user can and will make mistakes, and we have a number of safeguards in place to prevent or remediate them. When users are entering an...
Your organization, if it has reached certain thresholds of size or complexity, has data stakeholders at all levels and across all domains. A data stakeholder, defined broadly, is someone who uses,...