Can Data Quality avoid the Dustbin of History?

After reading two blog posts about the 2011 predictions for data management by Steve Sarsfield and Henrik Liliendahl Sørensen, I was pondering writing a 2011 prediction post of my own—and then I read this recent Dilbert comic strip.

What if Dogbert is right and the only things that matter are social networks, games, and phones?  What implications does this have for the data management industry, and more specifically, the data quality profession?  How can data quality practitioners avoid being cast into the Dustbin of History in 2011 and beyond?

Perhaps we need to create a social network for data?  Let’s call it DataTweetBook.  Although we would be allowed to follow any data with a public profile, data would have to approve our friend requests—you know, in order to respect data’s privacy.

(Quick Side Bar Question: Do you think that your organization’s data would accept your friend request—or block you?)

Next, we would partner with Zynga and create DataVille and Data Quality Wars, which would be online games exclusive to the DataTweetBook platform.  These games would include fun challenges, like “consolidate duplicates in your contact database” and “design a user interface that prevents data quality issues from happening.”  You and your data can even ask other people and data in your social network for help with completing tasks, such as “ask postal reference data to validate your mailing addresses.”

Of course, we would then need to create iPhone and Android apps for DataTweetBook, DataVille, and Data Quality Wars, so that everyone can access the new social network and games on their mobile phones.  And eventually, we would start a bidding war between Apple and Google over the exclusive rights to make an integrated mobile device, either iDataPad or DataGoogler.

So that’s my 2011 prognostication for the data quality industry—it’s going be all about social networks, games, and phones.

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