IDQ Conference Blog

One thing we try to do at the IDQ Conference is to take photos of things that happened at the conference, presenters, presentations, activities etc.

We are compiling a library of these photos on Flickr under a flickr group for IAIDQ publicity called (surprise surprise) IAIDQ_Publicity.

If you have photos from the IDQ2008 conference you’d like to share with us, please upload them to your Flickr account , tag them as “IDQ2008″ and then share them with the IAIDQ_Publicity group.

I was conflicted this afternoon. I really wanted to sit in on Walid el Abed’s presentation, but instead sat in on Guy Tozer’s session. I certainly didn’t make a wrong choice.

Guy’s presentation dealt with the missing layer between IT and Business in the context of information quality, that layer being Enterprise architecture.

Guy’s presentation really echoed with my experience dealing with IT architects who didn’t understand information modelling from an enterprise (ie the BUSINESS) perspective, which resulted in poor quality data and information in key systems. If I had $5 for each time I’ve been advised by IT not to start the data modelling until late in the project I’d have a lot of dollars.

Guy was passionate and entertaining… a key theme was ’shared knowledge’, with an information architecture being a key layer to tie the ‘technological’ and business perspectives together, giving context to each to create additional value.

The only problem with being involved in the organizing and running of conferences is that sometimes you get called away from a really interesting presentation to go and do something mundane (like find where all our coffee mugs and badges had gone to!), so I had to pop out of this session about 11 hours earlier than I wanted to… and Guy was only doing a 3 hour tutorial!

I really hope I can persuade Guy to contribute to an event in Ireland or the UK in the near future – he has a very worth while perspective on these issues, which he delivers with incredible passion.