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Malcolm Chisholm Profile
Malcolm Chisholm

@MDChisholm

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Strategic Adviser & Thought Leader in: Data Governance - Fastblocks Writer - MDM - Data Quality - Ref Data Mgmt - Metadata Mgmt -Data Centric Tools

USA
Joined July 2010
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@MDChisholm
Malcolm Chisholm
4 days
Are Data Governance processes less governed than the data and processes they seek to govern? Some examples of what some DG units do:. ·      Metadata in Excel spreadsheets, manually maintained, with dozens of tabs, complex formulas, and metadata repeated across different
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@MDChisholm
Malcolm Chisholm
5 days
Data Product Owner – Upside vs Downside? What is the upside to being tagged as a Data Product Owner? I mean to the individual so tagged, not to the collective good of the enterprise. As for the downside, it seems to be more work for the individual. This includes: keeping
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@MDChisholm
Malcolm Chisholm
17 days
Data Privacy Gone Wild? I recently noticed messages about personal information being removed automatically from files. As the post in the image below highlights the decision of our Tech Overlords to add yet another click to our “experiences” with their products is annoying. But
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@MDChisholm
Malcolm Chisholm
18 days
Emotion and Metadata? Apparently, they can mix, and not in a good way. Walter A. Shewhart gives an example in the quote below where the inclusion of “Best” in the name of a data element can produce an unjustified emotive response in a reader who is not fully informed. Maybe
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@MDChisholm
Malcolm Chisholm
24 days
Data Policy Format Is Important! Suppose we have a data asset like a table that is out of compliance with a data policy. Well, what exact point in the policy is the table out of compliance with? If the policy is a giant blob of text, then it might be quite difficult to point to
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@MDChisholm
Malcolm Chisholm
25 days
Is Data Quality in a bubble? Of course, we understand that DQ issues can affect business operations and decision-making. But, at the meta-level – the theory and practice of DQ – it seems we think of it purely in terms of Data Governance and Data Management professionals as
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@MDChisholm
Malcolm Chisholm
26 days
Is NULL inherently confusing? It would seem so as it can represent many different things, including:. - A data value is currently unknown, but might be known in the future,. - Something is missing in the real world, such that we cannot record a data value now or in the future. -
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@MDChisholm
Malcolm Chisholm
27 days
How old is data? It seems to be pretty old, predating systems of writing. One example is The Lebombo Bone found in a cave in the border region between South Africa and Eswatini (formerly Swaziland). This fibula of a baboon is 45,000 years old and has notches that make it look
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@MDChisholm
Malcolm Chisholm
1 month
Zero Governance but Observed! Who needs July 4th when July 3rd is “National Compliment Your Mirror Day”. I do not celebrate it, but I am interested in its origins, as it seems to capture the Zeitgeist. Alas, it is not possible to track down who created it, but somehow it is
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@MDChisholm
Malcolm Chisholm
1 month
Is Data Governance Kafkaesque? Well, sometimes it seems so. Here is one example. DG formulates its own workplans internally and comes up with a set of projects. Then it sends out random requests to other organizational units asking for things ,or telling them to do something. The
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@MDChisholm
Malcolm Chisholm
1 month
Data Decisions vs. Data Catalogs. The “passive” metadata approach of limiting the use of data catalogs to harvesting structural metadata from database environments seems to be a common pattern. Yet after 10 years of data catalogs we still see data decisions being done in an ad
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@MDChisholm
Malcolm Chisholm
2 months
I want to share the newest episode from "The Rock Bottom Data Feed" Podcast where we dive deep into Principles and Policies. Thank you John Ladley and Mark Cooper for having me!. Hopefully you will enjoy our conversation. I’d love to hear your thoughts, drop a comment or send me
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@MDChisholm
Malcolm Chisholm
2 months
The Data Quality dimension of Accuracy vs. Philosophy. Entities have attributes. Some are intrinsic, e.g. my eye color. But many “attributes” are extrinsic, like my Customer Lifetime Value to McDonalds (probably not much). This distinction was explored by the UK philosopher Peter
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@MDChisholm
Malcolm Chisholm
2 months
Let’s try to do some Philosophy of Data Quality! Is data quality to be assessed relative to the purpose of data? To consider this question we need to understand the concept of “scientism”. It was defined by F. A. Hayek in his book The Counter-Revolution of Science as follows:
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@MDChisholm
Malcolm Chisholm
2 months
Subject Matter Experts (SME’s)? There seems to be a presumption on the part of Data Governance – and the broad IT community – that SME’s exist in the business. Sticking with data, the expectation is that there will always be SME’s who can explain data to the degree required for
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@MDChisholm
Malcolm Chisholm
2 months
I was thinking about identity as a core MDM issue today, and then saw the INFA/Salesforce announcement. So the “INFA” identifier will be going away, but there are even more transient identities. Consider a suitcase checked in on an airline trip. It has an identity for that trip
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@MDChisholm
Malcolm Chisholm
2 months
Consider the humble indicator. This column specifies whether an entity instance does or does not have a particular attribute. Which is bizarre if you adhere to third normal form. More importantly, the indicator sits one sematic level above the attribute it is referring to. Thus,
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@MDChisholm
Malcolm Chisholm
2 months
It is important to have a controlled vocabulary for all data policies. This is different to having a glossary in an individual data policy, which is also important. The controlled vocabulary is needed to ensure that:. (a) Any specialized term going into a data policy is not a
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@MDChisholm
Malcolm Chisholm
2 months
A definition is supposed to convey the essence of a concept, and we certainly need definitions for data elements. But there is more to data elements that we need to capture, e.g. any rules for data entry, including checks a data entry operator will perform. These too needs to be
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@MDChisholm
Malcolm Chisholm
3 months
How general is MDM, vs how specific are the management needs of types of Master Data Entities? E.g. files need MDM. We may not think of them as a typical Master Data Entity, but they are. Files do indeed have the general MDM needs of deduplication and the dealing with the same
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