Can Data Quality avoid the Dustbin of History?
Jim Harris
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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Reader Comments (5)
Thanks for the mention, Jim. I like the idea of the data wars game. Maybe we can get Zynga working on that.
Jim, this has to be one of your best blogs ever!
Without "data quality", what's the point of social networks, games, and phones?
That's a rhetorical question, by the way :-) Steve
Hey Jim,
How can data quality be relegated to the dustbin if it never was seriously implemented by most companies in the first place?
In my mind, data quality is like the IT response to Y2K - it is extremely necessary, but if it works properly, no one notices, which is why it becomes a punch line.
Steve (the other Steve ;-) )
In a sense, I would say that current definitions and approaches of/towards data quality might very well not be able to avoid the Dustbin of History.
In the world of phones, PDA’s quality of the information about environments, current fashions/trends, locations and current moods of the customer might be more important than a single view of customer or de-duped customers. The pace at which consumer’s habits are changing, it might be the quality of information about the environment in which the transaction is likely to happen that will be more important than the quality of the post transaction data itself . . . Just a thought.
My kids would definitely say that I'm behind the curve - but of course once their mammoth Facebook sessions are done they still like to eat, wear new clothes, and meet with friends in person - often all at the same time!
And if you've tried dealing with customer services for a social network or mobile operator you'll appreciate that (lack of) decent data quality can still be important.
There is a real point here in that as everything continues to get faster and in the data community we need to be more agile about data governance, data quality or data modeling and be seen to add business effectiveness and flexibility.
Meanwhile I'll get back to my quill pen and parchment. (Though I admit to having a private Facebook account, a work LinkedIn account - and you can even follow Evaxyx data governance on Twitter these days...)