In previous ruminations on this topic, we have suggested that a useful understanding of data literacy would build on existing knowledge of literacy and numeracy. While excellent and nuanced...
Aaron Walker
Recent Posts
Last month we posted some thoughts on the importance of data literacy for modern organizations, how growing data literacy can be part of a data governance program, and how the Data Cookbook in...
When we speak about literacy in everyday usage, we are usually referring to the ability to read and write in a given language, that is, to understand ideas from other people, and to communicate...
Ironically, when we use the phrase "road map" to describe anything other than travel, what we're talking about is not really much of a map, and it generally doesn't even have roads! Instead it has...
We hope everyone is staying home and staying safe, as much as possible. Being data-minded, we've of course been following the COVID-19 charts, graphs, and projections closely. Huge amounts of data...
Change is afoot..... - Those of you who are old enough may remember going to the library and looking up materials in a printed "card catalog," and perhaps going to the shelves and hoping to find the...
Nearly every organization has begun to use some software-as-a-service, where data originates, is processed and frequently stored in the cloud (or, as one of our clients likes to say, "on somebody...
IData was at the Educause conference in October, 2019, where Educause presented its top ten IT priorities for 2020, based on its research and membership survey. For the past several years, data...
By now you've decided that data governance (or data intelligence) is a good idea for your organization. You want to use organizational data to drive better decisions, and to better understand the...
When we speak with new or prospective clients, the topic of their organization's data quality often comes up. And it's frequently our experience that when someone who is not data-savvy thinks their...
We've been at this data management thing for a while now, and while much has changed over the last couple of decades, there are a few archetypes of data failure that continue to bedevil our clients...
Information – or the possession of information – is seen as a kind of power, and some people are loath to give it up. While some individuals hoard information for venal or nefarious purposes, in most...
IData Inc. has been in business since 2004, and we’ve performed a lot of different work for hundreds of clients in that time. It’s a little bit amazing then, how little some of the complaints we...
This post is some of our thoughts on data management issues throughout the data lifecycle including loss of focus, upkeep priority, security access and disposition of data.
Something we often say during our early conversations with clients is that data governance (or data intelligence) is what you do when you recognize data is an asset, and when you start to treat it...
Recently we found ourselves re-reading Educause’s annual Top 10 IT Issues, 2019 Edition. We commented on this publication when it came out, but we wanted to revisit in this post a few observations...
Recently we attended the AIR Forum, the annual conference for institutional researchers. As a company, IData has a fair amount of direct experience with the practice of institutional research,...
This post is inspired by two pieces of terminology that have seemingly been everywhere this year, and one factoid that’s been circulating for years. One term is “self-service business intelligence,”...
Recently we discussed the differences between a business glossary and a data dictionary, and why you are likely to need both at your organization. In this post we want to delve more deeply into the...
Having accessible knowledge is an important part of data governance (or also called data intelligence) and we thought in this post (and in upcoming posts) we would go back to the basics. Topic this...
In a previous post we shared some thoughts about shadow systems, and how they are symptomatic of poor data governance (data intelligence) practices as much as, if not more than, users seeking to...
Everyone knows shadow systems are bad, and yet they still proliferate. Rather than enumerate once again why you should take pains to avoid them, we want to spend some time in this post exploring why...
This blog post discusses the perception of data governance (and data intelligence). It sounds difficult and controlling. Maybe it should be called data guidance instead. Data governance should help...
The profusion of data sources and systems organizations including higher education introduces plenty of challenges (headaches?) for data managers and consumers. One of the most difficult challenges...
Of our clients who have embarked on an analytics program, many of them have seen the same issues emerge that came up when they introduced Business Intelligence (BI) tools, as well as historically...