Calling all data quality software vendors….TDWI needs your help

I couldn’t resist posting this one, but I want to start off by saying that I am big fan of The Data Warehouse Institute. They provide great information, their conferences are extremely valuable and their training classes provide the right level of practical learning.

But, their CRM system is in desperate need of some cleansing. Much like how Glyn Heatley discussed Data Quality Going Green (btw – until that post I didn’t realize that Glyn was a tree hugger. You think you know someone), TDWI needs to clean up their registration records. I received 3 emails from Wayne Eckerson (it wasn’t really from Wayne Eckerson) asking me to participate in a TDWI Benchmark survey. The emails all arrived within a few minutes of each other. The first one starts by addressing me as “Dear Graham”, while the second two start with “Dear Peter”. Now, on further inspection it is clear that this is partly my own doing. Each email was sent to a different email address since over the last 3 years we have internally changed our emails here at Palladium. But, that is the whole purpose of organizations house holding their data and identifying duplicates. I just find it entertaining that the organization (TDWI) that espouses having quality data is an offender. And it’s costing them money.

I did a quick search on the TDWI site to see if I could find any whitepapers or studies that I would recommend they take a look at. I found the following best practices report on taking data quality to the enterprise. The great thing is that if they are looking for some software vendors who can help, they can just take a look at the sponsor list for the best practices report.

I am hoping they won’t take away my membership based on this posting.

DIG Bits & Bytes

Some items that have fallen on the blogging scraps floor from the last couple of weeks:

BEA AquaLogic Product Future

There have been a lot of rumblings of the future of the AquaLogic product suite, primarily because of the rumor that the professional services group from BEA is folding into WebLogic team. A component of the platform, among other things, is a set of Web 2.0 technologies and Enterprise social computing. It would be surprising to see these products go away based on the current market, but stranger things have happened.

Sharing Information to Make Decisions

After September 11th, the intelligence community was chastised for their lack of information sharing. The “need to know” culture impeded sharing nuggets of knowledge that could help the different intelligence departments make better decisions. To change this mentality, the CIA developed the Intellipedia platform. The CIA will be sharing their story at the Enterprise 2.0 conference this week in Boston. It is certainly an interesting case study of how an organization, public or private, can leverage social computing to improve information sharing and collaboration.

And Finally, For the Artistic Crowd

I happened across this site “Dashboards by Example”, which provides a wealth of information for those considering implementing a dashboard within your organization. There are some great examples and best practices crossing a broad range of subject areas including web analytics with Google Analytics (we are a user and big fan) to an IT related dashboard. The author provides his perspective on Dashboards versus Scorecards which is always an interesting topic for debate.