Data Governance

Wednesday at the conference began the series of shorter sessions. The day kicked-off with the one-hour keynote from Elizabeth Kirscher, President of Morningstar’s Data Services Business. Her presentation, titled “When Data Quality Drives Revenue“, centered around the accomplishments of Morningstar in the data management field and the road that they took to get there. Elizabeth’s background was in sales, so when she began leading the Data Services Business she didn’t quite have the technical background that one would associate with that position. This just goes to show that many data issues reside on the business side, not in IT. In her tenure at Morningstar, where her team is seen as a profit center (lucky her!), she has gone through many regulation and standardizations as well as mergers and acquisitions. Listening to her stories about these business moves was very interesting.
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On the first day at the Information and Data Quality Conference, I attended the session, “Using Data Profiling for Proactive Data Quality Improvement“. That session was for the first half of the day, so for the second half I attended the Len Silverston session titled “Power and Politics in Data Quality Improvement Efforts“. This was a great session that had very little to do with data theory and data management, and a lot to do with interoffice dynamics. The session opened up with the question, “What is the biggest problem in data quality today?” Many good answers were tossed out by the attendees, but I think the answer that Len submitted trumped them all… read on for the answer.
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