Archive for the ‘Data Governance’ Category

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“Driving forward while looking in your rear mirrors”

Published by Winfried van Holland on 15-12-2008 in Data Governance, Data Quality and Top 10 Tech Strategies 2009. 0 Comments

top101The 2nd Strategic Technology for 2009 according to Gartner’s David Cearley is Business Intelligence. And as stated by the well known title above this blog there is always the risk of trusting too much on your history while making decisions for the future. We’ve seen in the past that ‘these mirrors’ have improved already. There has been significant reduction in ‘history’ in the business intelligence and actual information – it has become more real time. That has direct impact on smartness of decisions and on positive impact of the companies business performance.

No need to convince ourselves that data really brings value in BI! Still we see BI projects struggling with the foundation. The obvious statements as “garbage in is garbage out”, can we really trust the actual figures generated from our BI tool, and did the change management investments on the people providing the data really convert them in ‘data friendly persons’. I still need to smile internally if people complain about the garbage quality of the other departments and are completely convinced of their clean data - challenge them to cleanse and dedup their outlook contacts!

Another pitfall related to data quality is that people trust too often on keys or IDs. I’m sorry but data quality is much more than matching on keys or IDs, even on official keys like social security numbers.

A recent blog from Oracle’s Frank Buytendijk “The Crisis Was Caused By ‘Performance Management’, And Performance Management Will Have To Solve It Too.” brings this whole strategic technology in the right after ‘crisis dip’ perspective. How come that with all these new BI tools we didn’t see a economic crisis popping up in our windscreen, or were we too much focused on the rear mirror. Hope to read soon more from his analysis!

What customers don’t want you to know

Published by Ramon de Noronha on 15-12-2008 in Data Governance and Data Quality. 1 Comment

A solid credit rating for consumers has become more important than ever. In the USA companies already provide services to consumers enabling them to verify their credit rating. Whenever a change occurs in your credit rating, you will receive an alert.

They even offer services including protection from so-called “Identy theft”. All those services are marketing-wise labeled as “privacy matters”.

But when privacy really matters to you, have a look at the following video-clip or visit the site http://www.privacymatters.nl. On 14th May Human Inference will organize a breakfast meeting in the Netherlands on this very topic together with the expert Alexander Singewald (breakfast meeting).

Not every Cloud has a silver lining

Published by Winfried van Holland on 10-12-2008 in Data Governance, Data Quality, Data Quality on Demand, Data Services and Top 10 Tech Strategies 2009. 1 Comment

Cloud Computing or Cloud Services that’s the ultimate dream we have. It doesn’t bother anymore where services are running, we need a handle to it and it can start raining. Pending on which part of the world you live, you like clouds or not. For someone with lastname “van Holland” it’s almost hard to believe that he needs to trust the clouds!

Number 3 on Gartner’s list on Top technology strategies for 2009 is dealing about Cloud Computing. And a more detailed blog with the challenging title “Delivering Cloud Services: ISVs – Change or Die or both!” on that topic can be found on the blog of Daryl Plummer.

Continue reading ‘Not every Cloud has a silver lining’

Virtualization: It’s the data! – not the hardware

Published by Winfried van Holland on 09-12-2008 in Data Governance, Data Quality, MDM for customer data and Top 10 Tech Strategies 2009. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

The first Strategic Technology to watch according to Gartner is Virtualization. And I do like their twist in the whole virtualization debate – focus on data. While the whole world is linking the word virtualization with optimizing your hardware assets by using a virtual layer on top of your hardware. By optimizing the usage of your assets in this virtual way you can significantly reduce the total cost of ownership (ToC).

David Cearley at Gartner comes with a fascinating other angle. Basically he sees virtualization also as strategic technology to virtualize the data. And by that twist, data quality and data governance appears annoyingly in the middle of your radar screen. In order to use this strategy for your operational excellence, to eliminate the number of redundant data on your real storage devices, and make a virtual layer between your applications and this virtual data storage, you need to be sure that all your applications can work seamlessly with that virtual data.

Continue reading ‘Virtualization: It’s the data! – not the hardware’

Top 10 Technical Strategies for 2009

Published by Winfried van Holland on 09-12-2008 in Data Governance, Data Services, MDM for customer data and Top 10 Tech Strategies 2009. 1 Comment Tags: , .

Recently – close your eyes and imagine the meaning of recently in this climate of economic crisis – David Cearley from Gartner published a blog on the most important technical strategies for 2009. In a couple of blogs I want to pick some of them and emphasize my view on them in relation to data value.

In general I agree with the top 10 of technological strategies, be there some slight personal priority adaptations, but let’s focus on that in later blogs. The missing point is in my opinion the lack of emphasis on risk mitigation, and I do realize that things changed since October 2008. Which technologies can we adopt to avoid that we provide services, products, at the end money to the wrong contacts, or that we are sure to deliver it to the right contacts. The technology strategy of Master Data Management, Know your customer, Single View of X, or how we call it, will need our attention in 2009!

ROI of Data Quality: Do you really need to know?

Published by Eddy Reimerink on 19-11-2008 in Data Governance, Data Quality and MDM for customer data. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

What ROI?

It must have been around 2002, that I was discussing the Return On Investment of Data Quality solutions with one of the founders of Human Inference, Norbert Mergen. While discussing the well known benefits: less return mail, more effective campaigns, reduction of debitor risk, single customer view, … I brought another subject at the table: isn’t it strange that we really do ROI calculations on such an obvious need? Did you ever create a fence in the garden and question the ROI of a hammer? We published on this matter in dutch back in 2002 in the CRM Marketing Centre and included the hammer discussion. And now, in 2008, it is so interesting to see that many people nowadays have put the same questions, reading the blog of Jack Vinson “Stop thinking ROI, think success!” Anyway, it may not convince your management, so you will still need to do the maths, but just bringing the subject to the table may help you getting your data quality project going.