Friday, April 9, 2010

Links from my eLearning Webinar

I recently delivered a webinar on the Secrets of Affordable Data Governance. In the webinar, I promised to deliver links for lowering the costs of data management.  Here are those links:

  • Talend Open Source - Download free data profiling, data integration and MDM software.
  • US Census - Download census data for cleansing of city name and state with latitude and longitude appends.
  • Data.gov - The data available from the US government.
  • Geonames - Postal codes and other location reference data for almost every country in the world.
  • GRC Data - A source of low-cost customer reference data, including names, addresses, salutations, and more.
  • Regular Expressions - Check the shape of data in profiling software or within your database application.
If you search on the term "download reference data", you will find many other sources.

Friday, April 2, 2010

Donating the Data Quality Asset

If you believe like I do that proper data management can change the world, then you have to start wondering if it’s time for all us data quality professionals to stand up and start changing it.

It’s clear that everyone organization, no matter what the size or influence, can benefit from properly managing their data. Even charitable organizations can benefit with a cleaner customer list to get the word out when they need donations.  Non-profits who handle charitable goods can benefit from better data in their inventory management.  If food banks had a better way of managing data and soliciting volunteers, wouldn’t more people be fed? If churches kept better records of their members, would their positive influence be more widespread?  If organizations who accept goods in donation kept a better inventory system, wouldn’t more people benefit? The data asset is not limited to Fortune 1000 companies, but until recently, solutions to manage data properly were only available to the elite.

Open source is coming on strong and is a factor that eases us to donate the data quality.  In the past, it many have been a challenge to get mega-vendors to donate high-end solutions, but we can make significant progress on the data quality problem with little or no solutions cost these days. Solutions like Talend Open Profiler, Talend Open Studio, Pentaho and DataCleaner offer data integration and data profiling.

In my last post, I discussed the reference data that is now available for download.  Reference data used to be proprietary and costly. It’s a new world – a better one for low-cost data management solutions.

Can we save the world through data quality?  If we can help good people spread more goodness, then we can. Let’s give it a try.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own and don't necessarily reflect the opinion of my employer. The material written here is copyright (c) 2010 by Steve Sarsfield. To request permission to reuse, please e-mail me.