Wednesday Word: August 11, 2010

Wednesday Word is an OCDQ regular segment intended to provide an occasional alternative to my Wordless Wednesday posts.  Wednesday Word provides a word (or words) of the day, including both my definition and an example of recommended usage.

Quality-ish

Definition – Similar to truthiness, which my mentor Sir Dr. Stephen T. Colbert, D.F.A. defines as “truth that a person claims to know intuitively from the gut without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts,” quality-ish is defined as the quality of the data that an organization is using as the basis to make its critical business decisions without regard to performing data analysis, measuring completeness and accuracy, or even establishing if the data has any relevance at all to the critical business decisions being based upon it.

Example – “At today’s press conference, the CIO of Acme Marketplace Analytics heralded data-driven decision-making as the company’s key competitive differentiator.  In related news, the stock price of Acme Marketplace Analytics fell to a record low after their new quality-ish report declared the obsolesce of iTunes based on the latest Betamax videocassette sales projections.”

Is your organization basing its critical business decisions upon high quality data or highly quality-ish data?

Related Posts

The Circle of Quality

Is your data complete and accurate, but useless to your business?

Finding Data Quality

The Dumb and Dumber Guide to Data Quality

Wednesday Word: June 23, 2010 – Referential Narcissisity

Wednesday Word: June 9, 2010 – C.O.E.R.C.E.

Wednesday Word: April 28, 2010 – Antidisillusionmentarianism

Wednesday Word: April 21, 2010 – Enterpricification

Wednesday Word: April 7, 2010 – Vendor Asskisstic

Wednesday Word: June 23, 2010

Wednesday Word is an OCDQ regular segment intended to provide an occasional alternative to my Wordless Wednesday posts.  Wednesday Word provides a word (or words) of the day, including both my definition and an example of recommended usage.

Referential Narcissisity

Definition – When referential integrity is enforced, a relational database table’s foreign key columns must only contain data values from their parent table’s primary key column, but referential narcissisity occurs when a table’s foreign key columns refuse to acknowledge data values from their alleged parent table—especially when the parent table was created by another DBA.

Example – The following scene is set on the eighth floor of the Nemesis Corporation, where within the vast cubicle farm of the data architecture group, Bob, a Business Analyst struggling with an ad hoc report, seeks the assistance of Doug, a Senior DBA.

Bob: “Excuse me, Doug.  I don’t mean to bother you, I know you are a very busy and important man, but I am trying to join the Sales Transaction table to the Customer Master table using Customer Key, and my queries always return zero rows.”

Doug: “That is because although Doug created the Sales Transaction table, the Customer Master table was created by Craig.  Doug’s tables do not acknowledge any foreign key relationships with Craig’s tables.  Doug is superior to Craig in every way.  Doug’s Kung Fu is the best—and until Craig publicly acknowledges this, your joins will not return any rows.”

Bob: “Uh, why do you keep referring to yourself in the third person?”

Doug: “Doug is bored with this conversation now.  Be gone from my sight, lowly business analyst.  You should be happy that Doug even acknowledged your presence at all.” 

Related Posts

Wednesday Word: June 9, 2010 – C.O.E.R.C.E.

Wednesday Word: April 28, 2010 – Antidisillusionmentarianism

Wednesday Word: April 21, 2010 – Enterpricification

Wednesday Word: April 7, 2010 – Vendor Asskisstic

Wednesday Word: June 9, 2010

Wednesday Word is an OCDQ regular segment intended to provide an occasional alternative to my Wordless Wednesday posts.  Wednesday Word provides a word (or words) of the day, including both my definition and an example of recommended usage.

C.O.E.R.C.E.

Definition – As opposed to a C.O.E. (Center of Excellence), a C.O.E.R.C.E. is a Center of Enforced Reality called Excellence.

Example – “After a detailed cost-benefit analysis, executive management determined it would be a far more effective strategy to implement a C.O.E.R.C.E. and I have to say, so far it’s really working out quite well for us—seriously, I have to say that.”

Related Posts

Wednesday Word: April 28, 2010 – Antidisillusionmentarianism

Wednesday Word: April 21, 2010 – Enterpricification

Wednesday Word: April 7, 2010 – Vendor Asskisstic

Wednesday Word: April 28, 2010

Wednesday Word is an OCDQ regular segment intended to provide an occasional alternative to my Wordless Wednesday posts.  Wednesday Word provides a word (or words) of the day, including both my definition and an example of recommended usage.

Antidisillusionmentarianism

Definition – A corporate philosophy opposed to freeing executive management from any of their own illusions or false beliefs.

Example – “I explained that we have serious data quality problems and most of them have business process or people issues as their root causes, and that according to every industry data governance maturity model, our organization was very undisciplined, and that buying more technology wasn’t the solution—and then the CEO fired me for violating antidisillusionmentarianism.”

Related Posts

Wednesday Word: April 21, 2010 – Enterpricification

Wednesday Word: April 7, 2010 – Vendor Asskisstic

Wednesday Word: April 21, 2010

Wednesday Word is an OCDQ regular segment intended to provide an occasional alternative to my Wordless Wednesday posts.  Wednesday Word provides a word (or words) of the day, including both my definition and an example of recommended usage.

Enterpricification

Definition – whereas “enterprisification” is a slang term used to describe scaling or otherwise evolving a technology or service to the point of being able to handle enterprise-level needs, enterpricification is simply increasing the price of a non-scalable or otherwise limited technology or service to the cost usually associated with an enterprise-class solution.

Example – “In a rare moment of honesty, the CTO of Acme Software admitted today that the only distinguishing characteristic of the recently released enterprise edition of their product is enterpricification.”

Related Posts

Wednesday Word: April 7, 2010

Can Enterprise-Class Solutions Ever Deliver ROI?

Wednesday Word: April 7, 2010

Wednesday Word is an OCDQ regular segment intended to provide an occasional alternative to my Wordless Wednesday posts.  Wednesday Word provides a word (or words) of the day, including both my definition and an example of recommended usage.

Vendor Asskisstic

Definition – whereas “vendor agnostic” describes a general methodology or solution that does not require the technology or services provided by a specific vendor, vendor asskisstic is the complete opposite.

Example – “Although we requested a vendor agnostic proposal from Acme Consulting, their recommendation was so blatantly vendor asskisstic that it might as well have been printed in Big Blue letters.”