The IDQ 2008 conference is over (but I’ve a tonne of posts to upload tomorrow sketched out on my laptop).

However, one piece of news was announced at this week’s conference which too important to hold until the airport departure lounge….

For Immediate Release

The International Association for Information and Data Quality (IAIDQ) announces plans to develop a Certified Information Quality Professional^SM certification

IAIDQ moves to advance the profession of information and data quality professionals by developing a certification program

San Antonio, TX, September 26, 2008: During the International Association for Information and Data Quality’s (IAIDQ) 3rd annual Information & Data Quality (IDQ) Conference, Christian Walenta, IAIDQ president, announced the organization’s plan to develop a Certified Information Quality Professional^SM certification or CIQP^SM.

“We are excited about the opportunity to advance the information and data quality profession by offering a comprehensive certification ” Walenta said.

The scope of the certification includes measuring broad expertise in and practical knowledge of information quality principles, concepts, methods and skills.

“We anticipate that individuals responsible for conducting, leading, or championing information quality will be interested in obtaining the CIQP^SM certification” Walenta explained. Walenta went on to explain that the certification will benefit many. “Not only will individuals benefit from the certification but so will companies interested in improving the quality of their data and information by defining standards and the the skill set required to be competent professional”

In order to help ensure that a quality examination is developed for this certification, IAIDQ has partnered with Castle Worldwide, Inc., an organization specializing in examination design and development.

Walenta stated that “Our current plan calls for the examination, and hence the certification, to be available during the second quarter of 2009”.

This announcement was well received by IDQ Conference attendees.

Dr. Thomas C. Redman, known by many as the “Data Doc” and author of the just released Harvard Business Press book Data Driven: Profiting from Your Most Important Business Asset, stated “we are reaching an exciting time as the importance of quality data penetrates organizations. This certification program ensures that practitioners have the knowledge and skills they need to deliver improvements to their organizations.”

Larry English, internationally recognized thought leader, speaker, educator, author and consultant in knowledge management and information quality improvement stated, “We have not yet entered the “Realized” Information Age. Information Quality Management principles and processes based on the sound and proven quality management principles that matured the Industrial Age are the core competencies required to transform society and business to bring in the second Quality Revolution. If we are not managing our Information with quality, we cannot manage our business. Certification of competency in sound IQ Management principles, processes and methods will accelerate our ability to reduce the high costs and losses caused by broken information processes.”

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For further information:

Christian Walenta: christian.walenta@iaidq.org

(Additional information for editors)

About the International Association for Information & Data Quality

The International Association for Information & Data Quality (IAIDQ, www.iaidq.org) is a professional association for those interested in improving business effectiveness through quality data and information. Chartered in January 2004, IAIDQ is a not-for profit, vendor-neutral professional society of people passionate about improving information and data quality. The IAIDQ is advancing the quality of information and data around the world by building a community, supporting learning and sharing knowledge for the benefit of all information consumers.

For more information, please visit iaidq.org.

About Castle Worldwide, Inc.

CASTLE Worldwide, Inc. builds long-term relationships with government agencies, corporations, educational institutions, and trade and professional associations by offering examination design, development, training and administrative services. Founded in 1987, CASTLE Worldwide is one of the nation’s leading certification and licensure testing companies. More than 80 organizations count on us for assistance with their testing, training, learning and certification programs.

Related Presentation:

Information Quality and ROI wasn’t the title of Andrew’s presentation. However, it could have been. Andrew gave a very entertaining run through his experiences not as a ‘data quality guy’ but as a CEO of a leading edge company seeking to do things with data and information. In Andrew’s words he’s a “business guy”, with a background in McKinsey Consulting amongst other roles.

The gist of Andrew’s presentation was a run through the process by which his business (GroceryPower) has developed and the critical and central role that quality information plays in that business.

I don’t want to rehash the details of Andrew’s presentation here but, suffice it to say, without good quality information, or more accurately, without an approach to taking diversely formatted information that doesn’t necessarily follow natural language patterns and often has bizarre abbreviations, then the business idea that Andrew had would be infinitely more challenging. Indeed, Andrew described the Information Quality issues in his business as being the “mack truck” that hit them very early on.

However, Andrew’s people have developed strategies to management of information quality improvement that enable what Andrew calls “continuous breakthroughs” – step changes in capability and ability to do things with data that I would describe as continuous improvement on steroids. Lots and lots of steroid

Apart from his insights into his philosophy and approach [I noted them down as kill hierarcies, statistics aren’t the only tool, people are bad, and continuous breakthroughs are possible and should be common  -but I’m sure I missed some of them). Andrew also entertained with some insights into the metaphors his team developed to describe what it was they were building…

Andrew’s presentation was one of the clearest illustrations I’ve seen of the value of information quality and an information quality aware approach to business strategy.

Andrew’s presentation was even more impressive given that he had put it together again this morning after his laptop crashed.

So, Grant Robinson and I were sitting in our accomodation at the IDQ Conference this evening updating various parts of the IAIDQ’s web presence.

One of the pre-canned Google alerts that drops into my inbox every few days is one looking for references to the IAIDQ. Usually, we get lots of links back to ourselves or websites of our members. This evening I was pleasantly surprised to find a lovely write up about our IQTrainwrecks.com website over at the Streamline Training and Documentation blog.

Thanks to Karen Nelson for posting her very nice comments about our humble trainwrecks blog. Interestingly, Karen isn’t listed as a delegate at the IDQ2008 conference, so we must assume she found www.iqtrainwrecks.com herself and liked what she saw there.

Of course, Karen isn’t the only blogger writing about our activities. Beth over at DataGeekGal (and we’ve met a few of them the past few days… hello Joy Medved if you are reading!). Beth wrote a nice post about our efforts here to live blog the IDQ conference… things haven’t gone quite according to our plan, but then that’s part of live TV isn’t it.

thanks to all the bloggers out there who have contributed to the global information quality community (whether they realised it or not).

Monday evening saw the IAIDQ have its Association General Meeting at IDQ2008. We filled Salon B here in the Marriot Riverwalk as Daragh O Brien warmed up the crowd with an introduction to the IAIDQ, or (if you were already a member) a reminder about the Association.

IAIDQ Coffee mugs were handed out, as were IAIDQ badges in keeping with the jovial theme of Daragh’s presentation.

Daragh was followed by Christian Walenta who delivered a thought provoking keynote message for Information Quality professionals.

Because Daragh and Christian covered a lot of stuff, we’ve produced a handout for people to read the themes and topics covered. Handout document.

Daragh and Christian’s presentations were followed by a call to action to get involved in working teams for Publicity and for the IQForum discussion list. This drew an immediate response from members from Australia (not Grant) and Canada who were eager to help out.

Finally, Andrew Griffiths (IAIDQ VP Partner Relations) shared his thoughts with us on defining the value proposition for Information Quality and for the IAIDQ. This is something we are working on and look forward to talking to members, non-members, suppliers, and potential sponsors about over the coming weeks and months. Indeed, this is an on-going process as we will need to continually improve our understanding of our value and the value of information quality.

Sitting in Bonnie Neill’s session I was interested to hear her discussion of the importance of semantics and the problems that arise due to people using terms in the way they understand them (or not) compared to the way others understand them.

In the first 10 minutes she made me think about pornography. Bonnie talked about how in our organisations we have people talking about ‘dirty data’ but it is not clear what the definition of not dirty data is. And this reminds me of how an American judge, Potter Stewart once defined pornography…

“I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it”.

Bonnie identified miscommunication as a key issue.. we are not precise communicators and this leads to a universal problem of miscommunication.

A root cause is acronyms, geographic regions (local idioms and also how organisations manage across geography), slang, mergers of companies (different cultures and different short-hand). Also, terminology gets frozen in a system which causes the business process to freeze at the level of thinking and understanding that persisted when the system was first built.

What interested me about this part of Bonnie’s presentation was how it echoed and reinforced much of the themes of the presentation I will be doing with Arnt-Erik Hansen later in the week as well as many of the themes i’ve raised in articles in the IAIDQ newsletter over the past few years.

It is nice to know that I’ve not been alone in my experience of this point of pain, but equally it is interesting to note that the EXACT same awareness of the challenges of language in information quality exist both at the level of selling the idea to senior management to get them supporting the effort as well as at the level of actually doing the work.

Business rules are also an issue – they are often not articulated but are locked in people’s heads… which leads to private sets of business rules… this leads to a communications barrier due to the assumptions made by individuals. This reminded me of much of the theme of Walid el Abed’s tutorial yesterday.

Bonnie also pointed out that meaning often gets buried in the system. Because each system has its own system of meanings, it makes it harder (if not impossible) to share information across systems … or across organisations… or between organisations.

Exposing the terminology helps solve the problem. Good definitions in a data dictionary spell out the problem.

There was lots of sharing of war stories about data dictionaries and our experiences of defining information… I think the summary of that part of the session is “grrrhhh”, because that’s a phrase we all used.

As I thought about the topics raised by Bonnie, I couldn’t stop thinking about a particular marx brother’s skit. I dug it up on Youtube and might (technology and time permitting) make reference to it in my own presentation… but here it is for now..

Bonnie went on to talk about derivations (derived terms and derived values)… unfortunately single definitions are difficult if not impossible achieve, hence synonyms etc. need to be documented.

Bonnie also stressed the need to exercise stewardship… in otherwords getting the name of the business person(s) who defined a term and getting them to own it. This is consistent with good governance practices and sound principles of quality management.

What is an address? Grant Robinson had a great example about his experiences in water management.

Term confusion is also a key issue.

Unfortunately I had to step out of Bonnie’s session early (the first coffee break) to help give the kiss of life to a colleague’s laptop so I missed the rest of her session. I hope others will fill in the gaps in what I missed.

Wow! What a great day.

I sat in on tutorials by Joy Medved and Walid El Abed. Some great take home messages.

1. How to use Six Sigma techniques in IQ projects. My company uses ISO9001, but some great ideas can be used straight away.
2. A simple practical idea for documenting business rules, tying them in to data quality metrics and KPIs. My presentation on Wednesday will be about metrics and KPIs and this was the logical next step.

Great stuff!

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.

Tonight is the first night of the IDQ Conference. It is great to touch base with our friends and ‘family’ in the information/data quality community. I’m sitting now having a serious (hee hee) discussion with Danette McGilvray, Joy Medved, Grant Robinson, Arnt-Erik Hansen, Christian Walenta and Tom Redman.

Oh, yeah, Lwanga Yonke is here as well….

fun and laughter is being had. This is what this conference is all about… peers and like minded people sharing experiences and really bad jokes.

The bad jokes are mine.

I’ve arrived in San Antonio ahead of the IDQ2008 Conference. As a Director of the IAIDQ, I’m attending our annual Board strategic planning retreat which happens just before the conference each year. Getting together with other members and directors is very important to ensure we keep the IAIDQ moving as an association.

The conference hotel is nice, close to the Alamo and within walking distance of where I’m sharing accomodation with Grant Robinson?our VP Operations) and Arnt-Erik Hansen, our VP Member Services.

All three of us are excited about the conference, particularly given the quality of the presenters this year. Part of the discussion we have at the strategic planning each year is how to continually improve the IDQ conference to ensure and improve relevance and quality of information at the conference… each year it is a little harder to top the previous year as there are so many good speakers and good case studies emerging.

I’m hoping to live blog as much of the conference as possible, but AT&T’s wifi network in San Antonio has a bit of an IQ problem… … it requires the capture of your credit card billing address twice?for security), but on the second form it doesn’t allow you to put in a country other than the US, so my card validation fails. harrumph.

I’m as excited as a five year old in the week before Christmas.

 In a few short days I’ll be in sunny San Antonio at the IDQ 2008 Conference. Below is a copy of an email I sent out to the IAIDQ contact lists last night summing up the conference. I’ve edited it a little so it fits in the blog, but you’ll get the picture… IDQ2008 is shaping up to be a wondeful conference!!

International Association for Information & Data Quality

IDQ 2008: Less than ONE WEEK to go!!

Don’t miss your chance to attend the world’s leading independent gathering for Information/Data Quality Professionals

-Book now while places are still available-

22-25^th September, San Antonio, Texas

 

The IDQ Conference 2008 builds on the heritage and expectations from previous years to offer you unparalleled opportunities to meet with and learn from leading figures in the information quality profession, such as Larry P. English, Danette McGilvray, David Loshin, and Tom Redman. Not only that, but IDQ 2008 gives you unmatched forum to meet with, network with, socialise with, and be inspired by your peers in the information quality profession.

 Don’t take our word for it:

I look forward to this every year.  I always walk away with good info.
- Keith Patterson Sr. Project Manager for Data Quality, Kaiser Permanente 

I really got a feeling about the community and support structure building within DQ 
- Calum Craigie, Senior IT Architect, Standard Life

Great time! Good chance and opportunity to mix with peers who can and have experiences in common to drive and develop resolutions. Excellent networking.
- William Vandall, VP/Mgr Underwriting Services, FM Global

Leading Speakers!!

Join thought leaders in the information quality profession like Tom Redman, Larry English, Danette McGilvray, Lwanga Yonke, David Loshin and many others as they share learning experiences across 12 tutorial sessions and nearly 40 hours of peer case studies and shared learnings based on practical reals world experiences.

Learn how Tele-tech Services fared on their journey to Information Quality. Learn how British Telecom manage the ‘care and feeding’ of their Information Quality programme as Constant Gardeners. Discover how Data Privacy issues can have significant implications for your Governance and accountabilities for Information Quality.

Take a look at the Conference Agenda for more details!!

Multiple Conference Tracks!!

Learn about information quality issues across any of the EIGHT conference tracks, designed to help you get the most ‘bang for your buck’ from IDQ2008. Choose from:

·         Information Quality Journeys – learn from the sucesses of your peers.

·         Essential Foundations – fundamentals principles and “lessons learned”

·         Governance, Stewardship & Accountabilities for IQ – who should do what, when, how, and why to help you on your IQ Journey?

·         Specifying, Measuring and Reporting IQ – how do you define what quality information is? How do you measure it? Who to you report it effectively?

·         IQ Value, ROI and Management Support – learn how other organizations value information quality, calculate their ROI and engage and retain Management support.

·         Improving and Controlling IQ with Six Sigma and Lean – how do you apply the principles of Six Sigma and Lean to the quality of the Information Product?

·         Leading the IQ Function – how do you plan, manage, motivate and maintain your information quality function to sustain IQ improvements?

·         Methodologies and Standards – what frameworks are out there to help you forumlate your Information Quality strategy and execute it effectively?

To learn more, take a look at the Conference Agenda !!

Attend 1, 2, 3 or 4 Days!!

Delegates can choose to attend as many days as they wish. Whether you want to focus on tutorials or peer networking, or are struggling to balance your desire to attend with other priorities, you will be able to pick options that let you enjoy the maximum learning experience possible.

Again, don’t take our word for it:

Only able to attend the last day. What I’ve attended is high quality and useful.
- Martha Gardill, Enterprise Information Architect, Chevron Corporation

Go to WWW.IDQ-CONFERENCE.COM to register!!!

Tell a Friend!!

Please pass this email on to your friends and colleagues – they may find content of interest to them. If they are interested, you may be able to avail of our group booking discounts!

Group Booking Discount!!

Bring a colleague (or colleagues) and avail of our group booking discounts.

Register FOUR delegates for the price of THREE. Just call +1-310-337-2616 x103 to register your group.

 

We look forward to seeing you in San Antonio!

 Hope you can make it!!!