Recently Read: January 23, 2010

Recently Read is an OCDQ regular segment.  Each entry provides links to blog posts, articles, books, and other material I found interesting enough to share.  Please note “recently read” is literal – therefore what I share wasn't necessarily recently published.

Data Quality

For simplicity, “Data Quality” also includes Data Governance, Master Data Management, and Business Intelligence.

• Data Quality Blog Roundup - December 2009 Edition – Data Quality Pro always provides a great collection of the previous month's best blog posts, this particular entry covers my data quality “recently reads” from before the start of the new year.
• Hostile Environment Data Harassment – Phil Simon discusses the common tendency for an organization's culture to not only compartmentalize data issues, but also tolerate “data carelessness” and irresponsibility.
• Data Profiling For All The Right Reasons, Part 1 – In this Hub Designs Blog guest post, Rob DuMoulin begins a tool-agnostic five-part series about data profiling using psychology and Jungian word association analysis.
• Personal Data – an Asset we hold on Trust – Daragh O Brien shares an intriguing case study about data protection, and discusses the key stages and data protection principles in the Information Asset Life Cycle.
• Standardizing Data Migration – Evan Levy uses a motion picture industry analogy to suggest establishing a separate functional team that’s responsible for data packaging and distribution.
• A Data Quality Riot Act – Rob Paller shares a great real-world example of data quality challenges even when an enterprise system is well-designed with protocols specifically put in place to ensure proper data management and data quality.
• What is a MDM Strategy – Charles Blyth channels the ancient wisdom of Sun Tzu to explain that an MDM strategy is the overarching governance that defines the goals, reasons, approach and standards of its individual initiatives.
• Data Quality issue in my new database - or so we thought... – Rich Murnane shares an interesting real-world example of how not every apparent data problem turns out to be an actual data quality issue.
• Diversity in City Names – Henrik Liliendahl Sørensen explains the challenges inherit in global data quality using the example of the many ways that the city of Copenhagen, Denmark can be represented due to linguistic variations.
• How data quality derives from meta data – Rayk Fenske examines the relationship between data quality management and metadata management by discussing directed functional dependency as well as a hierarchy in requirements.
• The Quality Gap: Why Being On-Time Isn’t Enough – Jill Dyché discusses the all-too-common tendency to emphasize efficiency over effectiveness in enterprise project management, where everything is date-driven and not quality-driven.
• Name Patterns and Parsing – David Loshin explains that personal names, although conceptually straightforward, are beset by many interesting pattern variations, making them a very daunting data quality challenge. 
• A true story of how data quality issues can cripple a business – Graham Rhind shares a remarkable real-world example that illustrates very well the effect poor data quality (and lack of information quality) can have at every level of an organization.
• WANTED: Data Quality Change Agents – Dylan Jones explains the key traits required of all data quality change agents, including a positive attitude, a willingness to ask questions, innovation advocating, and persuasive evangelism.
• The Power of Slow - Paul Boal begins an excellent series about slow by explaining that a proper understanding of slow truly reveals it is the far more efficient approach—and not just for data quality. 
• Data vs. Facts, Illustrated - Mark Graban discusses the common problem of relying too much on reports and dashboards without verification of the underlying data—and shares a hilarious picture to illustrate the point.   
• The Value of Data – Marty Moseley discusses the core issue that most businesses still do not understand the value of data to their organizations, and shares some findings from a recent data governance survey.
• ETL, Data Quality and MDM for Mid-sized Business – Steve Sarsfield on challenges of investing in enterprise software faced by small to medium sized businesses, and opportunities in the freemium model of open source alternatives such as Talend.
• Beyond Data Ownership to Information Sharing – Joe Andrieu provides an interesting look at the often polarizing topics of data ownership, data privacy, and information sharing, explaining that we want to share our information, on our terms, protect our interests, and enable service providers to do truly amazing things for us and on our behalf. 
• The Great Expectations of BI – Promising new blogger Phil Wright provides an excellent Dickensian inspired explanation of why, in many organizations, business intelligence doesn't live up to its great expectations.   

Social Media

For simplicity, “Social Media” also includes Blogging, Writing, Social Networking, and Online Marketing.

• When Your Company Culture Isn't Ready for Social Media – On the Harvard Business Review blog The Conversation, Jeanne Meister and Karie Willyerd discuss whether your organization is culturally ready to implement social media.
• Why Twitter Will Endure – David Carr of The New York Times explains how he came to understand that the real value of Twitter is listening to a wired collective voice.
• Are Your Ears Burning? - 20 Tools for Tracking Social Media Marketing – Merle shares a great list of “online reputation” management tools, which are useful for monitoring your social media presence.
• The 10 Stages of Social Media Business Integration – On Mashable, Brian Solis explains the ten most common stages that businesses experience as they travel the road to full social media integration.
• Defining Social Business – Stowe Boyd explains that a social business is an organization designed consciously around sociality and social tools, as a response to a changed world and the emergence of the social web.
• Three Ways to Get a Rush from Your Writing – In this Men with Pens guest post, author Phil Simon shares some of his great writing advice, including the need to “get it down before it gets away” whenever inspiration strikes.
• 40 Reasons Why The CEO Still Uses The Yellow Pages And Not Social Media – Jeff Bullas shares a hilarious list of the reasons the typical CEO still wants to use the Yellow Pages and not embrace the new marketing of the 21st century.
• In Defence of The Real Social Media – An amazing post by Naomi Dunford, especially recommended for anyone who claims social media is only about superficial connections and doubts online friendships can ever be real friendships.
• A-List Bloggers Agree: ‘Entertaining Differentiation’ Is Key to Success – In this Write To Done guest post, Bamboo Forest explains entertainment is a major reason people read blogs, and why differentiation is so important to blogging well.
• The Power of Uniqueness – Darren Rowse  discusses some of the ways that the best blogs tend to stand out from the crowd, and shares 19 starting points for helping you become a unique blogger.

Book Quotes

An eclectic list of quotes from some recently read (and/or simply my favorite) books.

• From Confessions of a Public Speaker by Scott Berkun – “Expressing ideas is often the only way to fully understand what ideas are, and to know what it is you really think.  Expression makes learning from the criticism of others possible, and I'm happy to look like a fool if in return I learn something I wouldn't have learned any other way.”
• From The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) by Seth Godin – “The opportunity cost of investing your life in something that's not going to get better is just too high.”
• From Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone. by Mitch Joel – “It's no longer about how much budget you dump into advertising and PR in hopes that people will see and respond to your messaging.  The new online channels will work for you as long as you are working for them by adding value, your voice, and the ability for your consumers to connect, engage, and take part.  This new economy is driven by your time vested—and not by your money invested.”