Category Archives: Brain Wandering

The importance of context

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Data is often defined as “Facts about things” and Information is often defined as “Facts about things in a context”.

From Lwanga Yonke (IAIDQ Advisor and one of the visionaries behind the CIQP certification) comes this great example of where, without consistent application of context, it is possible for the Data to give rise to poor quality and misleading information.

Sign showing population, feet above sealevel and year founded with the data totalled

Image linked from "thepocket.com"

What we see in the sign opposite are three distinct contexts:

  1. A count of the population (562)
  2. The height of the town above sealevel (2150)
  3. The year the town was founded (1951)

And of course, when we see a column of figures our instinct (since our earliest school days) is to add them all up… to give us 4663.

Of course, that figure is meaningless as information, and is also poor quality data.

I have personally experienced similar “challenges of context” in tracking back root cause analyses in Regulatory Compliance projects.. the stakeholder pulling the incident reports together didn’t consider context and as such was comparing apples with ostrich eggs (if he’d been comparing apples to oranges at least they’d both have been fruit).

I’d love to hear your stories of Contextual conundrums that have lead to poor quality data and erroneous Information.

IAIDQ Information Quality Blog Carnival (updated)

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A little later than we had planned, IQTrainwrecks.com is proud to publish the December edition of the IAIDQ’s Blog Carnival for Information Quality, a retrospective on blog posts that appeared in November.

[Edit: We’d actually missed one submission when we posted this. A horrendous oversight given the importance of the discussion. Apologies to Dylan Jones and the team at DataqualityPro.com for the boo boo]

Dylan Jones of DataQualityPro.com opens proceedings with an excellent and thought provoking debate about the nature of information quality and the role of Data Cleansing in a data driven business. The comments on this post are as interesting as the questions posed.

Then we had a short and sweet post from Dalton Cervo where he extolled the need for your information quality and data governance initiatives to be more than just a grab-bag of buzzwords but actually to be planned and executed with the understanding that each is a part in a machine that makes your business great and is capable of reacting and adapting to change.  My experience echoes Dalton’s very wise example that if the problem in in one process, the fix might need to be in that process and a number of other supporting processes.

I suppose, just like any other ‘manufacturing’ process, if the components of your machinery aren’t working in unison as they should, then the product will be defective and your machinery will eventually break.

(For those of you who don’t know Dalton, he’s  the Customer Data Quality Lead at Sun Microsystems, part of Customer Data Steward and a member of the Customer Data Governance team responsible for defining policies and procedures governing the oversight of master customer data.)

Next up is Charles Blyth. Charles is a veteran of the BI and MDM world from the business perspective. His blog post addressed the need to get Data Governance (and by extension, responsibility for information quality) back to the front-line:

Front line Data Governance is about driving data ownership back into the business, getting every resource at every data touch-point to ‘own’ the data. Get the people involved!

At this time of year when every magazine, TV station and pundit is producing their lists of things that happened in 2009 or will happen in 2010, Henrik Liliendahl Sørensen shares with us his 55 reasons to improve Data Quality. Each of these on their own is the seed for a business case (how many duplicate Christmas cards did you get from your suppliers this year?) and should form the basis of Information Quality New Year’s resolutions in companies around the world.

Jim Harris has also been busy in November with a range of posts on his own blog and on the Dataflux Community of Experts blog. At this time of year when a festive gent up living around the frozen North Pole (no… not Henrik, I’m talking about Santa Claus) is making lists and checking them twice, it is only appropriate that we’d pick Jim’s great post on Customer Incognita, where he talks about the challenges of defining the simplest fact most businesses need to know. Now… how would he handle “Naughty” and “Nice” as attribute definitions?.

Finally, Daragh O Brien shared some thoughts on how you need to keep your customer in mind when making changes in processes or technology so that you don’t wind up causing problems downstream and creating IQTrainwrecks in the process.

The look back on December will appear in January. Thanks to everyone who has written such thought provoking and stimulating posts on Information Quality in 2009. It’s hard to believe that there wasn’t this community of writers in existence this time last year.

IQ Trainwrecks are kind of like buses..

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…none for ages then a lot of them at once.

Yesterday and today have been bumper days for trainwreck reporting in the media. From the two culled from Damien Mulley, and one suggested by Nick Thomas to the ones I’ve picked up on today, it looks like February will be a busy month on the IQTrainwrecks site.

Here’s a listing of today’s issues:

Perhaps the organisations referred to should consider taking a peek over at www.iaidq.org to see if they can pick up any tips on how to avoid these types of error in future.

Thanks to all the people who have visited the site and contributed examples of IQ Trainwrecks since we went live in April last year…. keep them coming!

Dude, where’s my lake?

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This isn’t strictly speaking an IQ trainwreck but it highlights how information, even about things which look pretty darned permanent, can age and become inaccurate and poor quality quite quickly.

Again, it is from the pages of The Register… apparently the Chilean’s have lost a lake. Now, car keys I can understand….

However, this echoes stories which I heard about people who relied on SATNAV systems in the aftermath of storms and flooding and drove into rivers because the satnav told them there was a bridge there.

The issue here is Accuracy to Reality… sometimes reality can be a devious thing and go and change on you.