In my experience there are a few consistent themes that emerge in data management and data governance work. Despite diversity of industry, culture and size, our clients face four common challenges in efforts to establish effective data management.

To paraphrase the DAMA Guide to the Data Management Body of Knowledge (DMBOK), data management means understanding enterprise data needs; collecting, storing, and protecting data, continually improving data quality, maintaining data security, and maximizing effective use and value of data assets.

Challenge #1: Get started

After a couple of weeks organizing my thoughts, here’s my attempt to string together, in one run-on sentence, my key takeaways from the 2011 Forrester Content & Collaboration Forum:

Organizations should be striving to create an engaged workforce – which generates collaborative content containing mission critical knowledge worthy of harvesting – by strategically implementing an information workplace that seamlessly integrates the right combination of email, calendaring, intranet content, instant messaging, web conferencing, video conferencing, team sites, document management, wikis, blogs, microblogs, and the enterprise social network… and for the love of God, it better be mobile-enabled, and all else being equal, let’s put it in the cloud.

Now you know what you’re doing in 2012.

People in the business community often question the value of professional certifications. Is the cost of passing an exam worth it? Some people say yes. Some people say no. Some people qualify their position by suggesting a certification is only worthwhile if an individual lacks sufficient experience in his or her field.

As someone who owns a couple of certifications, I admit my bias toward seeing value in achieving them. With that bias in mind, allow me to explain my rationale for the value of professional certifications. I purposely use the general term “professional certifications” to include certifications for technologies, methodologies and the like because I suspect my rationale applies equally to all.

In the past I've never understood what people really mean they say "think outside the box" but Jim Harris, in a recent OCDQ blog post, helped me figure it out.

Mr. Harris ends with this provocative line: "the bottom line is Google and Facebook have socialized data in order to capitalize data as a true corporate asset."  The post starts with a cold war analogy and proceeds to describe how Facebook and Google have made big money as "internet advertising agencies:" offering free services with which users (like us) serve up personal data in return for use of the service, then selling advertising space based on our data (hopefully anonymized).

The Art of Defensive and Offensive Merger Prep

As with most other business scenarios, M&A negotiations often force a company to take a defensive or offensive position on M&A due to timing and company priorities.  Many organizations are reactive (though they prefer the term opportunistic) and force their organization into a defensive position at the mere rumor of a consolidation.  Other organizations recognize that business consolidations are part of their growth strategy and therefore invest more in planning in order to ensure a degree of readiness.  The more proactive an organization is in their targeting and internal readiness, the more that effort and resulting assets can be turned into an offensive strategy.  The executive team will build off your preparation and confidence.

                          M&A: An Event or a Discipline? How Ready Are You For Growth?

            The consolidation of two businesses may start with marketing or distribution agreements, a joint venture or a CEO call.

Compliance Lifecycle

Reform, Comply, Report. STOP!!!!

Implementing some form of Regulatory Reform & Compliance Management in an organization could be as simple as the title indicates but rarely is, nor should it be. Quite the opposite, in recent years governing bodies and shareholders have been demanding increased accountability and management transparency resulting in a progressively more complex regulatory environment.

In my reading I recently came across the concept of the Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom (DIKW) hierarchy. While it is perhaps loosely defined, I see the concept as a helpful way to illustrate the progression from raw data to actionable information (requiring wisdom to handle it correctly). There are valid criticisms of this model, but it does reflect the goal of collecting and managing data - turning it into something that allows business users to make wise decisions.

So how do we get our business customers from data (which is available in quantities so big they are difficult to grasp) to knowledge and wisdom? Let's consider the illustration of buying a house.

Who would want to be a national health care administrator?  Who would want the responsibility for managing health care and formulating health policy for tens or hundreds of millions of people?  It seems obvious that such decisions would rely on quality data.  A recent interview impressed upon me how much data managers can learn from a field where data recording millions of separate life and death decisions aggregates to support decisions on the future allocation of health care resources.

Heather Richards of the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) was recently interviewed by the Australian magazine Image and Data Manager on CIHI efforts to provide neutral, objective and unbiased information to those making health care allocation policy decisions. Ms. Richards also happens to be Director of Publicity for the International Association for Information and Data Quality (IAIDQ).

In a detailed, concise, and refreshingly buzzword-free conversation, Ms. Richards described CIHI’s approach to improving data quality.  To me, that approach boils down to these three themes:

I've planned to write this article for quite a while, not to profess my love for Drupal, the open source PHP-based web content management system, but to discuss some of Drupal’s weaknesses and scenarios where Drupal isn’t the best fit. Many of these ideas are relevant to other open source and vendor web content solutions as well.

Because there’s a lot to talk about, this is the first in a 3-part series.

Most of my colleagues know that I'm a big proponent of open source software and particularly of Drupal. I started freelancing and building sites with Drupal during the early days of Drupal 5 and have found it to be a great platform for building content-managed sites in many cases. Fast forward 4 years and we at CapTech are running large scale, enterprise projects implementing Drupal.

Also exciting, over the past year or so, Drupal has started to gain more popularity among the "independent" analysts, seeing frequent mentions from Gartner and Forrester.