Everyone seems to be discussing a recent QAS data quality survey entitled ‘Contact Data: Neglected asset seeks responsible owner’ that questioned over 2,000 organizations worldwive and revealed an increasing number of businesses taking data quality isses seriously and bringing it up to the boardroom level.

“Within the past three years, the number of businesses where the responsibility of data integrity has risen to boardroom level has soared by 16 per cent, showing how important an issue accurate data has now become.”

The survey also stated that:

* the number of employees directly involved in the data quality management has increased by 5% only in the last year
* 23% of the businesses that participated in the survey claimed to use strategica data planning applications on daily basis
* 46% have their own documented data quality strategy

These increasing numbers sure are encouraging and if the growth persists, or even speeds up a bit, we might see a conceptually new, better, cleaner data emerge as an accepted standard of data quality. Now that would be nice, wouldn’t it?

However, with the survey showing 34% of respondents not validating any of their customer and prospect data, there’s still a long way to go to reach the “standard” I’m talking about.

QAS group operating officer Jonathan Hulford-Funnell says: “I find it incredible that organisations are not paying more attention to data quality. It shouldn’t be seen as a burden for middle management, it should be something that every employee in the business takes responsibility for.”

I stumbled upon this article in NetworkWorld discussing the increasing adoption of Software as a Service practices all over the industry.

It states that the recent “Forrester survey of more than 1,000 IT decision-makers in North America and Europe found that 16% of enterprises had adopted SaaS as of 2007 – an increase from 12% the previous year but still a small minority.”

The article goes on saying that the “actual enterprise adoption of SaaS might be much higher, though, because business units often deploy hosted applications on their own, sometimes seeing it as a way to free themselves from relying on IT.”

The number of IT executives who have at least some interest in hosted software indicate to Herbert that IT involvement in SaaS projects is poised for a big increase.

The hosted software market is growing more mature, with extensive customization and integration into an enterprise’s internal systems. And whereas SaaS applications are typically for general business tasks like human resources, there are now hosted applications designed specifically to help IT staffers manage an enterprise’s technology.

The article is available over here.

“Widespread confusion was created during the 1950s and 1960s when each U.S. locality could start and end Daylight Saving Time as it desired. One year, 23 different pairs of DST start and end dates were used in Iowa alone. For exactly five weeks each year, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were not on the same time as Washington D.C., Cleveland, or Baltimore–but Chicago was. And, on one Ohio to West Virginia bus route, passengers had to change their watches seven times in 35 miles! The situation led to millions of dollars in costs to several industries, especially those involving transportation and communications. Extra railroad timetables alone cost the today’s equivalent of over $12 million per year.” (From here.)

Yes, DST is a problem, and yes it’s gonna become only more so over the years. We live in a world totally different from the one our parents lived in. We live in an extraordinarily connected world, where the slightest time inconsistence may lead to irrecoverable errors and losses. That’s why speculations arise as to whether DST really is as important and ncessary of a thing, as is portrayed? Let’s see. With DST:

1. SaaS vendors have problems with updating time if they run applications on multiple servers. I.e., there’re problems with Google Calendar.

2. We face problems with synchronizing data and scheduling. The trouble lies in synchronizing and avoiding all the mismatches that might occur as a result of different countries switching to DST at different times and timezones changing “on the run”.

3. Time changes disrupt sleep patterns, cause harm to the health, and so on. According to health researches, DTS increase death rates, suicide commitments, heartaches, etc.

4. DST wastes more energy resources rather than saves any, according to various studies.

Clock shifts and DST rule changes have a direct economic cost, since they entail extra work to support remote meetings, computer applications and the like. For example, a 2007 North American rule change cost an estimated $500 million to $1 billion.

5. We miss meetings and appointments

6. Have problems interpreting and meeting deadlines
7. Struggle to tackle security-related issues and correlating log files

8. International business systems that function across multiple time zones face confusion

9. And so on and so forth.

Globalization made us as interdependent as ever and our world as web-connected as never (and you can only wonder how much closer it will get) and if the problems over DST might have been insignificant a decade or so back, they are far from being so today. Today DST makes businesses stumble, business intelligence fail and lead to the loss of our most precious resources - time and data… The question is why are things like that still allowed to happen?

IT is the easiest to blame for drawbacks and holes in your data, that’s no news. Whenever you don’t get the results and the information you need (provided your business processes are set to present you with quality data), you naturally start looking for someone or something to blame. And IT seems to be the perfect scapegoat. Little do we realize that the problems lie in the business, not in IT.

The thing is, we associate data with IT, consider it a part of IT and don’t realize the two are totally different. Gartner research VP Ted Friedman suggest the solution that should keep the blame off of IT and cause less data quality problems:

“Business needs to be in the driver’s seat,” Friedman said. “At the moment we feel that the focus on the topic is way way too much in the IT camp.”

To advance data quality, Friedman suggests the use of a data steward, who is responsible for benchmarking current levels of data quality and measuring the impact on the business of bad data. The data steward looks at the data transfer processes, making sure, for instance, that the data passes through as few people as possible.

Data stewards will come from a business background, but have good relations to IT, Friedman said. They will only be effective if they are held accountable for their progress, and receive bonuses for meeting quality targets.

There’s been talk of the concept of data warehousing being misleading, failing to deliver efficient solutions at the enterprise level and frequently causing problems upon implementation. Problems like that, again, don’t come out of nowhere, there usually are good reasons behind them. In this post I’l try to sum up a few things you should definitely try to watch out for when tackling your data warehouses:

1) First and foremost – Data Quality. When your data is dirty, outdated and/or inconsistent upon entering the warehouse, the results you are gonna get won’t be any better, really. Data Warehousing is not supposed to deal with your erroneous data, it’s not supposed to perform data cleansing. These processes need to take place BEFORE your data gets even close to the warehouse, that I s, your data integration strategy needs to address low quality data problem.

2) Come to think of it, Data Integration is the second thing to watch out for. Do your integration tools live up to your requirements? Can your software handle the data volumes you have? Will it comply with the newly added to your warehouse source systems and subject areas? How high is the level of automation of your integration system? Can you avoid mannual intervention? You gotta ask yourself all of these questions before you complain that your warehous isn’t providing you with the quality of information you expected.

3) Next, dreaming too big. When you build sand castles you gotta realize they’ll disappear in a matter of days, even hours. Your can’t have it all and at the same time, you can’t have your pie and eat it too. Brreaking the project into small segments, giving them enough time to deliver and having patience is the key to having a pleasant experience with your data warehousing solution. What? Did you think you can fix all the mess in your data in a matter of days? =)

4) Then, don’t go rushing into solutions. Don’t panic. Yes, warehouse projects require time and effort on your part. Yes, it’s gonna be complicated at first. But that’s not the reason to stop with one project and rush into another. Stick with your first choice, fix it, work on it. Multiple projects will waste your resources and end up as another silo aimlessly taking up your corporate resources.

5) Finally, make sure you have a scalable architecture that you can redesign according to your increasing needs. Your business grows, sometimes grows quicker than you think (the number of customers increases, they have more information, more data to be processed) and you want your solution to continue to perform on the same level and live up to your expectations.

The list goes on actually, as there are more things to watch out for… but these are the first that come to mind. =)

The questions have been up lately on whether the term Business Intelligence has outlived its practical side and whether Business Analytics is a more appropriate term. The opinions regarding the relationship of BI and BA split. Some say Business Analytics makes up just one part of, or a niche within this large concept of Business Intelligence. Others consider BI too vague of a term and feel more comfortable with Business Analytics as a definition for the new sophisticated data quality, data integration and etl tools.

The proponents of the second “theory” say Business Intelligence is changing the way businesses work and think. Bi here implies not only moving data around and producing reporting services, but also keeping pace with the constantly changing and dynamic business requirements.

So, what is analytics? Neil Raden of Hired Brains, a market research and management consulting firm, has said that, “the proper term for interacting with information at the speed of business, analyzing and discovering and following through with the appropriate action, is ‘analytics’.”

Well, the opinions may differ, but regardless of what you call it, be it Business Intelligence or Business Analytics, the data quality services Apatar provides play an integral role in interacting with information, merging, transfering and validating it - everything that both BI and BA are all about.

Take a look at how its data quality services can validate and improve your customer data and get it clean and easy to work with. Or browse data quality web demo over here.

Back to SaaS, more thoughts.

Software as a Service…a concept that seems so attractive and luring. Yet you can’t but ignore how some companies areconstantly criticizing it, telling the “horror stories” of how “friends of their friends” wasted time and resources depending on their SaaS providers, how it’s totally unreliable to let your customer data out and let some outsider be in control of it.

Rumours and fears like that don’t come out of nowhere, obviously. Companies, especially small and mid-sized businesses, get very touchy when it comes to their data and security for a reason. And the reason is…old-fashioned and conservative thinking.

In fact the ones that complain the most are usually the ones that realize the least just how vulnerable their data/software is inside their own company.  Com’n folks, look at the real picture.  With SaaS you’re not just letting out-of-house players be in control of your precious resources, but rather letting the pros protect, even fix it.

There’s nothing wrong in not knowing how EVERYTHING works and how to fix EVERYTHING. There are enough SaaS services to take a large chunk of your “everything” off your shoulders. =) Then you’ll be able to fcus on your internal assets and get double the work done with the same effort.

Let me list a few more benefits of having SaaS in your life:

• increased implementation speed;
• increased flexibility and usability;
• reduced dependence on IT services,
• access fom anywhere
• costs usually smaller than software license costs
• superior protection and security of your data

With that said…being conservative sure helps…sometimes… but as my coach used to say, “don’t be afraid of being progressive”.

Western Michigan University I.T. Forum to take place on March 28 forum at WMU’s Fetzer Center in Kalamazoo.

The forum will focus on the latest trends in Service-oriented architecture (SOA), Software as a Service, SaaS and the hosted systems is offers, and mashups, unifying internal and external data sources.

“Every business is using technology in some way,” Thomas Rienzo (who heads this year’s Western Michigan University I.T. Forum) said. “Every job is a tech job in some way. The question is, how do you do it? We’re hoping to provide some insight.”

David King, software architect for IBM, will propose how properly done service-oriented architecture can deliver more, deliver it faster and do it for less.

Ross Emerton, director of Fusion Solution Architecture of Oracle Consulting, will explain mashups.

Adam Caplan, president of Model Metrics, the largest Salesforce.com partner in metropolitan Chicago, will talk about the role of Software as a Service and its impact on business.

SaaS involves hosted systems - that is, the servers that power it live somewhere other than at the business for which they work. Having the hardware and the data offsite alleviates many of the maintenance headaches, but it also demands high trust, Rienzo noted.

You can register in advance at www.cis.hcob.wmich.edu/itforum, or by phone at 269-387-5410. Registration also will be taken at the door, beginning at 8 a.m.

Ever heard your sistem administrator (or for that matter any other person responsible for IT security in your company) complain that 24 hours in a day is just not enough to take care of everything? The server crashed, the software’s not working properly, network connections got screwed, laptops need to be configured, security alerts keep comming? No? Try running a vulnerability scan on your network and see the real picture. Your two or three IT people simply cannot do it all.

By turning to SaaS you make your data more secure, increase your working speed and productivity and let your IT people spend more time on thier direct responsibilities (and actually let them do their job more efficiently).

Think again, if you are still doubting to SaaS or not to SaaS =)

Back to data migration talk. Although DM might be associated with significant efforts and costs, it’s still better than leaving everything as it is (in a mess).

Here are some reasonable reasons to migrate:

• Increased compliance
• Improved functionality
• Future proofing
• Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO)
• Performance, reliability, scaleability
• Reduced risk of scope cutting, cost overrun, or project delay
• Improved data consistency across systems, processes, and organization
• Increased responsiveness to the business