The big transformation that we’re all dealing with in technology today is virtualization. There are many aspects to virtualization: infrastructure, systems, organization, office, and applications.  When you search on the internet for “data virtualization,” most of the references are regarding business intelligence and data warehousing uses. Back in the day, when I used to build

What we don’t currently emphasize greatly in Data Management is the end of the data life cycle, when data is archived and, possibly later, deleted.  This has been in the past because we’ve wanted to have available as much data as our technical solutions could store and if we couldn’t store all of it then

In most ways, Data Governance of Big Data is not different from normal Data Governance. The benefits are the same. The reasons for doing it are the same. And, mostly, what needs to be done is the same. What is different about Big Data Governance is that it’s about more data types, more sophisticated tools

The Data Management Association (DAMA) is now offering a Data Governance Certification as an option of their current Certified Data Management Professional, which is a natural extension since the test for Data Governance already existed under their current certification process and merely requires a specific configuration of test modules.  But what does Data Governance certification

I just returned from speaking at the DAMA Japan conference. A couple of the officers saw a presentation I gave at the DAMA International conference last April on performing Data Management maturity capability assessments and they asked me to repeat the speech at their conference in Tokyo. The Data Management Association (DAMA dama.org) created a Body

The average corporate computing environment is comprised of hundreds to thousands of disparate and changing computer systems that have been built, purchased, and acquired.  The data from these various systems needs to be  integrated for reporting and analysis, shared for business transaction processing, and converted from one system format to another when old systems are

There is an old philosophical question: “If a tree fell in the forest but no one heard it, did it make a noise?”  The basis of the question being that every time we’ve seen a tree fall in the past it has made a noise, but if no one heard it fall then maybe this one

On November 10 Dr. Peter Aiken will be coming to Northern NJ to speak at the DAMA NJ meeting about “Monetizing Data Management” – understanding the value of Data Management initiatives to an organization and the cost of not making Data Management investment. http://www.dama-nj.com/ At Data Management conferences I’ve been to over the last few

There is a great temptation to implement technology because it is “cool”, but for decades business and technology strategists (as well as most people in both business and technology) have realized that unless your business is to sell technology, the implementation of technology should be in support of business goals.  Sometimes, technology innovations can provide

Joe Dossantos spoke yesterday at the MDM & Data Governance Summit in NYC about Data Governance in an MDM (Master Data Management) program. Last year there was a brief discussion on Twitter about whether Data Governance was critical to an MDM program. Joe’s reaction to this question was “Duh!” – and currently it is certainly

In August I attended the NoSQL Conference in San Jose, California. This conference was about products and solutions that, primarily, don’t use relational databases.  The recent rise of interest comes from the Big Data space and includes areas that aren’t necessarily too big for relational databases, but that just don’t lend themselves to relational database

Is perfect Data Quality an attainable goal for an organization? Today I saw a blog post from Henrik Liliendahl Sørensen on “Unmaintainability.” My first reading of this title was “unattainability” which got me thinking about how Data Quality can be seen as “Unattainable.” When I was first hired by a particular multi-national financial services organization in the late 1980s,

For a long time I’ve mulled over whether it’s necessary to keep both a batch and real time infrastructure for Data Integration.  After all, if you have a fully functional real time Data Integration solution, then why do you have to operate two sets of software and monitoring?  This is not to say that it is absolutely necessary

I was recently reviewing the Data Integration architecture for a client and they asked me what they should be looking at for Data Integration when they start using Cloud Computing.  The simple, and boring, answer is that you should be able to use the same solutions in the Cloud as you are in a traditional

In recent discussions with Joseph Dossantos, he pointed out to me that the differences in architecting an MDM solution for Reporting, such as for a Data Warehouse, and for real-time transaction processing, go beyond the choice of batch versus real-time Data Integration.  Obviously, although the use of a batch ETL solution may be appropriate for integrating

Two years ago my friends convinced me to set up a Twitter account because, as they said, if I consider myself a professional “data person” (can I use that as a title on a business card?), then I should know more about this important data outlet.  My use of Twitter arises from two motivations: to

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about Data Integration.  Since most applications at organizations are now purchased packages, it seems that most of the custom development an organization needs to do is around consolidating data into a Data Warehouse or integrating applications together.  Integration isn’t just one of a CIO’s biggest problems, it should be one