Data Quality

September 30, 2015

Five Great Ways to Really Mess Up Your Data Warehouse During Loading

Your data warehouse is only as good as the data you load into it. But the data-loading process can be tricky, and there are ample opportunities […]
July 21, 2014

Design a business intelligence system properly — for business users

What are some common mistakes that business intelligence managers and architects make when planning and designing a business intelligence system? BI managers and architects generally do […]
February 27, 2014

Good News for Economics Majors: You’re Hot

Here’s some good news for Economics majors. According to today’s Wall Street Journal: In-House Economists are Hot Again One of the reasons they are hot again […]
August 24, 2011

Seven Misconceptions about Data Quality

The narrow definition of data quality is that it’s about bad data – data that is missing or incorrect. A broader definition is that data quality […]
April 6, 2011

Automate Data Remediation to Find Dirty Data Before Your Customers Do

I teach a graduate course on data warehousing at Northeastern University in Boston. Unlike the people I teach at clients’ sites or at conferences such as […]
March 30, 2011

Dirty Data: Embarrassing, Expensive, Avoidable

I recently experienced a data-quality problem first-hand while on the phone with the company that books my family a condo for our annual ski vacation. They […]
February 17, 2011

Good Data: The CFO’s Ultimate Challenge

  Consistent, correct data. That doesn’t sound too complicated, does it? But actually, one of the most daunting challenges facing CFOs and their staffs today is […]
August 24, 2010

Failing to Address Data Quality and Consistency – A Series of Unfortunate Data Warehousing/Business Intelligence Events #2

(This is part of our ongoing Series of Unfortunate Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence Events. Click for the complete series, so far.) If data warehouses could […]
May 29, 2009

People, Process and Politics – We All Hate Data Silos, So Why do They Happen?

Why are data silos so prevalent when we really ought to know better? We know that it’s risky to have inconsistent data. We strive for the […]
May 28, 2007

Five steps for weaving data quality management into your enterprise data integration processes

Data quality management needs to be an integral part of the design and planning of your corporate performance management (CPM), business intelligence (BI) or data warehouse […]
April 28, 2007

Data quality management: Follow the doctor’s orders

Doctors say that “prevention is the best medicine.” This holds true for data quality management, too. The sooner you identify potential problems the sooner you can […]
July 14, 2006

Should You Wait for Data Quality?

A couple of IT managers recently approached me with a thorny issue. The key business sponsor for their data warehousing effort asked them if they should […]
June 2, 2006

The Role of Data Integration in Providing Trusted Information

How trustworthy is the data that you provide? Not very, if it has quality problems. Data quality is one of the biggest roadblocks to trusting corporate […]
April 19, 2006

When patience is not a virtue

I was recently asked: “Should we wait until we fix the data quality problems in our source systems before we build a data warehouse?” My answer: […]
February 10, 2006

Be Prepared to Duel with Data Quality

Plenty of business intelligence (BI) or data warehouse projects have been blindsided by complications related to data quality. Sometimes these issues aren’t apparent until business users […]
January 28, 2005

There’s Nothing Funny about “Funny” Data

You’re involved in a business intelligence project, making great progress creating reports and cubes for analysis for your business users. They’re excited about what they see […]
October 12, 2004

Data Standards

  Data standards ensure the consistency, accuracy, integrity and validity that are critical to your success. Data is not usually clean and consistent, especially when gathered […]