We are at the threshold of the most significant changes in information management, data governance, and analytics since the inventions of the relational database and SQL. At their core, these areas have changed very little over the past thirty years. Most advances have been beneficiaries of Moore’s Law: faster processing, Read more…
In the Data Ethics episode of the Rock Bottom Data Feed podcast, our guest Daragh O’Brien made the observation that in our industry we often mix up word sequencing. For example, to him there is no such thing as “Data Ethics.” Rather, there is the application of ethics to data. Read more…
When was the last time you ran outside when you heard a car alarm? I remember once driving an old, heavy, muffler-challenged vehicle through a parking garage and setting off every car alarm in my wake. They made a lot of noise, but I don’t remember anybody rushing to the Read more…
A previous article established that the primary expectation of Data Product consumers is Reliability. This week we’ll look more closely at how we can provide that reliability. The five responsibilities of a Data Product provider are Content, Curation, Catalog, Certification, and Maintenance. Content: Data Products are created to satisfy anticipated and/or Read more…
You had blood drawn in the doctor’s office as part of your annual physical and just received a printout with a bunch of numbers. Cholesterol 142. Platelets 203. Glucose 93. And so on. And you probably believe them. Why? Do you even think about it? Consider all of the assumptions Read more…
From Day One, data warehouses and their offspring—data marts, operational data stores, data lakes, lakehouses, and the like—have been technological work-arounds. In Building the Data Warehouse, the 1992 book that launched modern decision support, Bill Inmon recognized the need for a decision support architecture that was different from the existing Read more…
Important lessons can be learned in one of two ways: the easy way or the hard way. I prefer the easy way, but when it comes to Data Quality, it seems like I’m in the minority. Last week we wondered aloud whether data quality really matters. This week we’ll see a Read more…
Maybe we’ve been going about this all wrong. It seems that everybody in the information management field continually emphasizes the importance of Data Quality, and everybody not in the information management field couldn’t care less. Maybe the latter group has it right. After all, product is flowing out and revenue Read more…
In a 1993 Seinfeld episode, Jerry describes the psychological leverage that doctors use on their patients. They tell you to go into the little room and take your pants off and wait. Then, “anybody that comes in with pants on seems like they know what they’re talking about. In any Read more…
Disruption is imminent. Is your company prepared? Your IT department? You? What do bank tellers, assembly line workers, retail clerks, blacksmiths, and travel agents have in common? They have all been largely displaced by technology. Application developers are next. In just a few years Generative AI will produce most of Read more…