IData Insights

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...

Organizations are constantly generating and gathering vast amounts of data. And this data is critical to the success of the organization. The amount of data makes it challenging for employees to...

Management at your organization might have the assumption that data governance creates a lot of extra work. That is not a totally false assumption. There is effort necessary for data governance and...

This is a different kind of blog post for me. I feel that every person in an organization that works with data (that is almost everyone) is part of the data governance team. This blog post will...

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:...

Data is a valued organization asset. Data is continually flowing and changing and growing. Your organization needs to properly manage data all the time. If you have not already done so, you need to...

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 4^th, and we hope everyone was able to enjoy it in their own way. The first week of July is often significant and occasionally...

It is difficult to hire an expert on the data at your organization. Usually, this expertise comes from years of working at your organization. You do not want your subject matter experts (key data...

What should you avoid when you are creating a data governance roadmap for your organization which also includes doing an assessment of your current data governance and data intelligence efforts? From...

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...

During technology projects there are many challenges as well as opportunities. And data governance and data intelligence can assist. Technology projects might include migrating to a new ERP,...

Let's discuss some ways that you can apply data governance best practices to your technology project and in an efficient way. Technology projects could include conversion to a new ERP solution,...

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...

You want to gain greater acceptance of your data intelligence, data governance, and data catalog efforts at your organization. You do this by getting more employees involved in the efforts and...

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...

Important content in a data governance knowledge base is a data flow catalog which contains information about such items as reports, dashboards, ETLs, data flow integrations, and surveys. Maybe you...

This blog post suggests the best sources of definition content and ways to determine what should be defined. The sources are existing popular reports, pre-existing local glossaries, data dictionaries...

In this blog post we will be discussing data governance or data intelligence committees (or whatever your organization calls it). Sometimes these committees are ineffective. There is nothing wrong...

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...

When an organization performs a survey (such as internal ones to employees or external ones to clients) they are more beneficial if they are tied to their data governance and data intelligence...

This blog post will discuss best practices when creating, monitoring, and reviewing a survey, either an internal survey to employees of your company, or to customers of your organization or to...