Archive for December, 2008

How green is your data value?

Monday, December 29th, 2008

top101Number 4 in the top 10 list of  Gartner’s Strategic Technologies is Green IT. David Cearleys take on this is quite straightforward. On the one hand regulations and more efficient equipment will force or help to reduce unwanted emissions. For our discussions - talking about data value - I see several angles:

  • Having the right contact details will reduce waste of natural resources because we bring the deliveries immediately at the right place, and it’s not only the deliveries that can be optimized, we can also avoid that deliveries get lost and natural resources are actually piped for /dev/null !
  • By valueing our data through deduplication we can in general avoid to spoil needless energy – both by humans and other resources – and use the sparse energy only for those who actually need it. Here I feel the same remark as David in his blog. There comes a moment in the near future, with an rising energy prices and increasing emission penalties, that that  aspect will win in the equation from the  actual spoil of goods and human energy.
  • Saving resources is now also done by concentrating or centralizing services – optimizing the service per energy unit. For data we see this happening in the Virtualization of data amd Master Data Management technologies. Strong place in your centralizing strategy will be the role of your data quality – that will bring your real value

I encourage you all to think out-of-the-box how data-value can help to make it a better world for the future. But I’m afraid that in this economic climate the short term is ruling and not the long(er) term.

End the year with some data quality fun!

Monday, December 29th, 2008

A very funny example of what difference a single character mistake can make. 

My Dad Wants a Horse but my Mom says no
My Dad Wants a Horse but my Mom says no

A happy new year and be sure to visit DataValueTalk.com in 2009 for continued data value.

Electronic Patient Record …

Tuesday, December 16th, 2008

Receptionist : “Pizza Hut, good evening”

Customer : “Good afternoon, can I order some pizzas?”

Receptionist : “Can I have your social security number”

Customer : “That is 987-65-4329”

Receptionist : “Thank you, Mister Allan Smith, your address 68 Queen Victoria Street, your fixed line is +1 559 556 1876. Your work phone at Dexia is +44 20 7329 7788 and your mobile number is +1 770 651 1440. From which location are you calling us?”

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“Driving forward while looking in your rear mirrors”

Monday, December 15th, 2008

top101The 2nd Strategic Technology for 2009 according to Gartner’s David Cearley is Business Intelligence. And as stated by the well known title above this blog there is always the risk of trusting too much on your history while making decisions for the future. We’ve seen in the past that ’these mirrors’ have improved already. There has been significant reduction in ‘history’ in the business intelligence and actual information – it has become more real time. That has direct impact on smartness of decisions and on positive impact of the companies business performance.

No need to convince ourselves that data really brings value in BI! Still we see BI projects struggling with the foundation. The obvious statements as “garbage in is garbage out”, can we really trust the actual figures generated from our BI tool, and did the change management investments on the people providing the data really convert them in ‘data friendly persons’. I still need to smile internally if people complain about the garbage quality of the other departments and are completely convinced of their clean data - challenge them to cleanse and dedup their outlook contacts!

Another pitfall related to data quality is that people trust too often on keys or IDs. I’m sorry but data quality is much more than matching on keys or IDs, even on official keys like social security numbers.

A recent blog from Oracle’s Frank BuytendijkThe Crisis Was Caused By ‘Performance Management’, And Performance Management Will Have To Solve It Too.” brings this whole strategic technology in the right after ‘crisis dip’ perspective. How come that with all these new BI tools we didn’t see a economic crisis popping up in our windscreen, or were we too much focused on the rear mirror. Hope to read soon more from his analysis!

What customers don’t want you to know

Monday, December 15th, 2008

A solid credit rating for consumers has become more important than ever. In the USA companies already provide services to consumers enabling them to verify their credit rating. Whenever a change occurs in your credit rating, you will receive an alert.

They even offer services including protection from so-called “Identy theft”. All those services are marketing-wise labeled as “privacy matters”.

But when privacy really matters to you, have a look at the following video-clip or visit the site  http://www.privacymatters.nl. On 14th May Human Inference will organize a breakfast meeting in the Netherlands on this very topic together with the expert Alexander Singewald (breakfast meeting).

Most popular first names in Holland for 2008

Friday, December 12th, 2008

Only a few weeks left in 2008 and Christmas around the corner. So it is time for the traditional Top 10 lists. The “Sociale Verzekeringsbank” who is responsible for the “Kinderbijslag” has created a list of the most popular first names which have been given to new-borns in 2008. 

Nr. Boys Girls
1 Daan Sophie
2 Tim Lieke
3 Jayden Julia
4 Sem Sanne
5 Thomas Emma
6 Jesse Lotte
7 Thijs Anna
8 Ruben Eva
9 Lars Anne
10 Milan Lisa

High Precision Matching at the heart of your Single Customer View Solution

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008

CDIwhitepaper There are many different purposes to create a single customer view. All those different purposes also require different technical architectures. And each architectural design is capable of delivering its own value to the company.  An analytical single customer view delivers value by supporting the company decision making via analytics and reporting. For instance: “how many customers do I really have in my focus market segments and what is the age distribution? “ An operational single customer view supports the primary business processes like sales and customer service.  For instance an outbound call center employee can deliver additional value to the company if an integrated view on the customers shows which products and services from different business lines have already been sold to those customers and which customer support issues are still pending.

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Not every Cloud has a silver lining

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008

Cloud Computing or Cloud Services that’s the ultimate dream we have. It doesn’t bother anymore where services are running, we need a handle to it and it can start raining. Pending on which part of the world you live, you like clouds or not. For someone with lastname “van Holland” it’s almost hard to believe that he needs to trust the clouds!  

Number 3 on Gartner’s list on Top technology strategies for 2009 is dealing about Cloud Computing. And a  more detailed blog with the challenging title “Delivering Cloud Services: ISVs – Change or Die or both!” on that topic can be found on the blog of Daryl Plummer.

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Virtualization: It’s the data! – not the hardware

Tuesday, December 9th, 2008

The first Strategic Technology to watch according to Gartner is Virtualization. And I do like their twist in the whole virtualization debate – focus on data. While the whole world is linking the word virtualization with optimizing your hardware assets by using a virtual layer on top of your hardware. By optimizing the usage of your assets in this virtual way you can significantly  reduce the total cost of ownership (ToC).

David Cearley at Gartner comes with a fascinating other angle. Basically he sees virtualization also as strategic technology to virtualize the data. And by that twist, data quality and data governance appears annoyingly in the middle of your radar screen. In order to use this strategy for your operational excellence, to eliminate the number of redundant data on your real storage devices, and make a virtual layer between your applications and this virtual data storage, you need to be sure that all your applications can work seamlessly with that virtual data.

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Top 10 Technical Strategies for 2009

Tuesday, December 9th, 2008

Recently - close your eyes and imagine the meaning of recently in this climate of economic crisis – David Cearley from Gartner published a blog on the most important technical strategies for 2009. In a couple of blogs I want to pick some of them and emphasize my view on them in relation to data value.

In general I agree with the top 10 of technological strategies, be there some slight personal priority adaptations, but let’s focus on that in later blogs. The missing point is in my opinion the lack of emphasis on risk mitigation, and I do realize that things changed since October 2008. Which technologies can we adopt to avoid that we provide services, products, at the end money to the wrong contacts, or that we are sure to deliver it to the right contacts. The technology strategy of Master Data Management, Know your customer, Single View of X, or how we call it, will need our attention in 2009!