IAIDQ El Festival del IDQ Bloggers: March Edition

El Festi... What?

Each month the International Association for Information and Data Quality, or IAIDQ, asks it's community of data quality experts to submit blog posts for the El Festival del IDQ Bloggers.  A different blogger volunteers to host the posts on their blog along with writing a brief summary of the submissions.  I am proud to once again host this event for the month of March.  Without further ado, I'd like to introduce this month's bloggers and their submissions.

March Submissions

Agapo Data!

Jim Harris, Blogger-in-Chief of Obsessive-Compulsive Data Quality, submits an interesting piece this month entitled Maybe you're just not that into your data?.  In this piece Jim uses a clever musical parody to remind us that "data needs love too" and that data quality project are not a  one-time project but rather need to be thought of as a "sustained program".  Enjoy the entire blog post here.

Jim is an independent consultant, speaker, writer and blogger with over 15 years of professional services and application development experience in data quality (DQ), data integration, data warehousing (DW), business intelligence (BI), customer data integration (CDI), and master data management (MDM).  He is a member of the International Association for Information and Data Quality (IAIDQ) and the Iowa Chapter of Data Management Association International (DAMA).  Learn more about Jim here.

Philia Data!

Daragh O Brien submits a telling parable, from IQTrainwrecks, of the potential costs and embarrassment that can arise if critical master data is not managed correctly and if sanity checks are not built into processes. UK local authorities have been taking themselves to court and pursuing costs against themselves for failure to pay parking fines.  Read the whole story here.

A busy man, Daragh is the driving force behind DoBlog.  Launched in 2006, the DoBlog is the personal blog of Daragh O Brien, former IAIDQ publicity director and information quality consultant based in Ireland.  In addition Daragh is also founder of Castlebridge Associates which is a specialist Information Quality, Data Protection and Data Governance consulting practice based in Ireland. The Castlebridge Mission is to help organisations manage their information assets as well as they manage their people assets.

IQ Trainwrecks was established in 2006 by the IAIDQ, IQTrainwrecks.com is a community reference site capturing case studies and examples of the impacts of poor quality information and data in the wild.

Data Mythos!

In this submission Henrik Liliendahl Sørensen explores the mythology behind why it seems most view data quality projects as a technology issue rather than a business one.  Regarding one of the more commented-on blog posts in recent memory, Henrik laments that "the best moments in blogging is having a lot of sensible comments".  See what all the buzz was about here.

Another busy man, Henrik is a data quality and master data management professional also responsible for creating data architecture solutions.  He currently is the Practice Manager for Omikron Data Quality.  Learn more about Henrik here.

Referential Treatment

Steve Sarsfield submits a post this month regarding the value of external data in the success of a data quality initiative.  From availability to Geocoding and U.S. Census data, Steve explores the exciting applications for external reference data in the validation and standardization of data.  Get the details straight from Steve here.

In addition to being the driving force behind the Data Governance and Data Quality Insider, Steve is also a data quality evangelist and author of the book the Data Governance Imperative.  When he is not busy writing Steve works on product marketing at Talend where he focuses on product strategy and press/analysts relations.

Integrity of Enterprise Data

Ken O'Connor explores one the more socially engineered pitfalls of data quality in his blog post where he recalls recent conversations with clients and assertions from Craigslist founder Craig Newmark. Find this and related blog posts here.

When Ken is not sharing his data management experiences in his blog Ken O’ Connor Data Consultant, he is an independent IT Consultant specializing in Data: Data Migration, Data Population, Data Governance, Data Quality, Data Profiling, Master Data Management, Business Intelligence.  Ken is the founder of Professional IT Personnel Ltd.  Check out more about Ken here.

In Closing ...

I've hosted the Festival del IDQ Bloggers once before and it is always an exciting opportunity to network with other data quality experts, read some great blog posts and exercise my skills in the writing forum.  I encourage anyone thinking about hosting to do so.  It's easy, fun and doesn't take a great deal of time to complete.  For more information on how you can host the Festival contact IAIDQ's Director of Publicity, Heather Richards, here.