IAIDQ Blog Carnival Post

We had originally planned to post this in the second week of the month but, as the late Douglas Adam’s once said, the nicest thing about deadlines is the sound they make as they rush by.

But without further ado, here are the selected blog carnival entries from May 2010.

First up is Graham Rhind, a Charter member

of the IAIDQ, whose blog is a place for anecdotes and moans, opinions and contemplations about data/information quality and international data.

Graham has specialised for over 16 years in international address and postal code methodologies. He has has written four books, “Building and Maintaining a European Direct Marketing Database” (1994) , “Global Source Book for Address Database Management” (1998, updated twice annually) , “Practical International Data Management – A guide to working with global names and addresses” (2001) and “Better quality data from your web form – effective international name and address Internet data collection” (2009, free to download and use).

In his blog carnival post, Graham shares his dream of a world where poor quality data (or information) is not left off the list of things to do until the moment of crisis.Read about Graham’s dream here.

Next up is Jim Harris who carries a similar theme as he drills down through the parallels between managing information and maintaining your teeth in his excellent“What going to the dentist taught me about data quality“.

Jim is a stalwart of the Data Quality blogging community at his own blog OCDQBlog.com and on the Dataflux Community of Experts blog.

Finally, Henrik Liliendahl Sorensen shares a story with us about how errors in information quality can be sticky, particularly as they build up over time (a bit like plaque builds up on your teeth requiring visits to the dentist to clear it off).

Looking at the 3 selected posts (and there were others) a clear theme emerges:

1. Once you start managing information/data in your business, a necessary part of that management is ensuring proper maintenance of cleanliness and quality.
2. Failing to operate with an eye to preventative maintenance (e.g. daily brushing and flossing) can lead to expensive and painful procedures to fix the problems in your data.
3. While you might be able to put lipstick on a pig, it is unlikely to be able to vote. So when an error is notified to you, care must be taken to track all the possible areas where that error might reoccur to avoid you having to play “whackamole” with information quality errors.
4. It is only when management begin to recognise that the management of information (and its quality and its governance) is a core function of Business that organisations can move away from crisis management when problems arise to assured action based on trustworthy information.

Feel free to share your thoughts below.