Listen to this article: The Data Management Association (DAMA) first published its Data Management Body of Knowledge (DMBOK) in 2009. In it was the now-familiar DMBOK wheel diagram. It has undergone some minor revisions since then, but nearly two decades later, it remains the best-known framework for data management. If you haven’t Read more
Listen to this article: Imagine you’re a product manager in Marketing. You use data every day. Then someone tells you, “Congratulations, you’re a Data Steward.” Your first question is perfectly reasonable: What am I expected to do differently tomorrow morning? Data Literacy training, of course. Traditional Data Literacy training begins Read more
Listen to this article: An executive is in a meeting with the CEO. The executive shares a report. The CEO asks, “Do you trust this report?” The executive replies, “Yes.” To which the CEO responds, “Why?” How often is that question asked, and when it’s asked, how often is it Read more
Listen to this article: Would it come as a surprise to learn that “slop” was Merriam-Webster’s official 2025 Word of the Year? Me neither. Every day I see articles lamenting AI slop. I’d like to suggest a different perspective: Not all slop is created equally. I’m not a very good Read more
Listen to this article: They probably are. That’s right, I said it. Most Data Quality metrics are useless. Of course, that assumes that you have any to begin with. And by the time you finish this article you’ll agree with me. Maybe it won’t even take that long. Let’s start Read more
Listen to this article: Imagine it’s all done. Well, it’s never all done, but imagine it’s all there: definitions, expected content, data models, profiling, documentation, support processes. Everything we’ve spent so much time trying to make happen. It’s all there. What now? Take a minute and try to imagine it. Read more
Listen to this article: Corporate leadership doesn’t care about data in the same way that we do, nor should they. They don’t care about the details of Data Governance or Data Quality. Certainly not data models. They don’t (or shouldn’t) select hardware, software, or database platforms. They shouldn’t be approving Read more
Listen to this article: In an earlier article, I highlighted the approach that some companies are taking of allowing, and in some cases encouraging, uncontrolled data replication. Replication may be an intentional executive strategy, although experience suggests it might not be the smartest strategy. Replication may also be a byproduct Read more
Listen to this article: Last week was the DGIQ-EDW conference in San Diego. It’s one of the leading industry conferences for data professionals, focusing on practical enterprise topics like AI governance, data architecture, stewardship, and organizational strategy. If you’ve never been I very highly recommend it. My agenda included teaching Read more
Listen to this article: Show of hands: how many of you have ever heard corporate leadership say something like, “We are moving everything into the cloud and closing down our data center so we can scale faster and save money”? Maybe you heard the slightly constrained corollary, “We are moving Read more