Rather than adding something new, try subtracting I read recently that sociological research suggests, when presented with a problem, humans default to “adding” something to address the problem, rather than subtracting. And of course, this got me to thinking about how this happens in data management all the time. Some examples: When faced with a particular challenge for collecting […]

It’s always people, process, and technology I speak and write a lot about people, process, and technology (Here’s a whole bunch on that.) In a nutshell, your highest performance will come when the right people are using the right technology in the right way (process). So whenever there is a data management challenge, we need to […]

Once it’s lost, trust can be difficult to regain I recall hearing once long ago that trust is like a bank account with one distinct difference. If you think of telling the truth as one unit of savings, a lie counts as four units of spending. Put another way, every time you “lie” you have to […]

Share your successes! I was speaking at an association meeting recently and one of the points I raised was that associations should practice what I call database PR or database public relations. In a nutshell, database PR is about proactively and regularly telling our users all the good work that is occurring in the database. (Here’s more on database PR.) We need […]

What are YOUR data integrity reports? Sitting in an AMS demo with a client recently, I was pleasantly surprised to see the AMS vendor had a short list of reports they called “Data cleaning” reports. These reports included a check for potential duplicate records, checking for erroneous emails, and checking for other missing data (e.g., […]