We tend to focus our data governance marketing, training, and services efforts on a few key roles: subject matter experts, business analysts and certain technical resources, and of course data...
Aaron Walker
Recent Posts
Last week we presented a webinar in our Data Governance--Best Practices series on data quality. Among the recommended practices were identifying the specific type of data quality issue (or issues)...
One of the reasons we got into this business was a desire to help organizations make better use of data. Over the years we have worked with hundreds of organizations to introduce data into the...
Many clients come to us when they are planning, or after they have embarked on, an overhaul to their business intelligence (BI) stack. They have often determined that their legacy tools are not...
Here at IData, we take an expansive view of data stewards, and we group a wide variety of tasks and responsibilities under the rubric of data stewardship. Without conscientious data stewardship,...
We spend a lot of time in conversation with prospective and active clients talking about their quest to be (more) data-driven. In those conversations, it can be taken for granted what "data-driven"...
Data visualization tools as well as design shops - this is an insufficient and reductive description for talented professionals who take data visualizations and tailor them further into often...
Over the past few months, we have explored the concept of data literacy in an individual and organizational capacity. Organizations are being pushed to be more data-centric just to keep up with the...
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...
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,...