The “single version of the truth” has been a BI cliché for quite a while. Particularly, there has been a long and noble quest in search of “the single view of customer” – a Holy Grail, lost in the profusion of customer databases that grow like weeds in the data center. Bold and valiant BI practitioners [...]

Does your company know? Many companies don’t. According to a 2009 global survey from The Information Difference, 42 percent of companies don’t measure their data quality, and an even greater number, 63 percent, make no attempt to measure the costs of poor data quality on the organization. Only 4 percent of companies claim to have [...]

Some data is inherently urgent and some is not. Consider the situation where: if you don’t make a payment on your mortgage in the next two weeks then the bank will foreclose and you’ll be out on the street. So you write a check and put it in the mail. The check is data; data [...]

But having lots of different mark-up standards and thousands of different API standards was also a bad idea for so many reasons. And that’s why XML was invented. In fact, I’d argue that, since the dawn of computing, the only really big innovation in data at the nuts and bolts level, has been XML; the [...]

Continuing from my previous blog posting, it occurred to me that it might be useful to approach the question “what is data?” by starting with the dictionary definition and seeing where it leads us. So here, slightly adapted, is the Merriam-Webster on-line definition of data: 1. Data is factual information used as a basis for [...]