Data Governance Matters

Consulting and Coat Hangers

Guest Host: Reese

One of my firmest convictions is that we are gifted with takeaways from almost every experience, we just need to be astute enough to pick them out. Here’s a recent one of mine…

It was over an hour before the meeting and about 10 minutes of driving to go when I pulled into the rest area. After the obligatory trip to the vending machine, I made a couple of phone calls then leaned back against the car for a few minutes of indulging in my favorite pastime, observing people.

There’s very little I enjoy more that listening to articulate, knowledgeable people talking about a field I’m not familiar with, and two men dressed in county maintenance uniforms discussing lift stations and flow patterns certainly fit that description. I was just turning to take one last sip of my drink before leaving when my elbow brushed the roof of my car and…

The cell phone hit the pavement, the back popped off, the battery skittered a few feet across the parking lot and down through a heavy grate. I walked over, and saw the battery about 3 feet below on the bottom of a culvert. The county employees walked over.

“Don’t worry; we’ll get it out for you. It’ll take few minutes, that grate weighs a couple of hundred pounds, we need to get the pry tool, a breaker bar with the right socket and put a cone out,” one said. “Sounds like a lot of trouble, let me try something first,” I replied.

I popped my trunk, pulled out a couple of wire coat hangers and a plastic bag (yes, I have that kind of a trunk,) straightened both hangers out, crimped the end of one of them around a corner of the bag, and squeezed it through the grate next to the battery on the bottom. I then took the other hanger, flipped the battery over into the bag and pulled it out.

It wasn’t until the ride home after my meeting when the takeaway from my experience hit me.

Those two men were intelligent, well versed in their field, and obviously had an established protocol to deal with the issue of getting into that culvert. However, it was a relatively labor intensive method, with my fresh perspective I was able to see a more efficient way to accomplish the task.

I’ve sometimes heard grumbling when a consultant is brought into an existing project. Bringing the newcomer ‘up to speed’ is sometimes regarded as just extra effort, after all, those involved have often been living and breathing the project for quite some time

But more often than you’d think, that newcomer just happens to have a couple of coat hangers in the trunk…

Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself…

I’m Reese Thomas; the Media Director here at the Data Governance Institute. If you read here regularly, you probably already know I’m also Gwen’s brother. I wear quite a few hats here at the Institute; I’m primarily responsible for our information infrastructure as well as some of the content on our web resources.

I’ve been juggling a couple of careers for years. I owned and operated an events promotion and production service with a strong emphasis on in-depth demographic analysis and attendance projections, market surveys, and media analysis. During this time, I was also a performing musician-entertainer, often working 300 gigs a year.

I’ve found an astonishing number of skill-sets I’ve acquired from each of these careers invaluable in my present position…

Tonight I’m having dinner in Cambridge with Beth Gold-Bernstein , who runs the ebizQ Virtual Conferences, and Peter Aiken, who teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University and runs DataBlueprint.

One of my all-time favorite dinners ever with Peter, March two years ago in Orlando at a Metadata-themed conference fun by the inimitable Davida Berger. Peter and I joined a small group for dinner and conversation about trends and best practices in data management, metadata,and data governance and stewardship.

A young woman at our table was asking questions, and my friend Denise Sparks of Exeros kept the laughter flowing by keeping a mock “tab” for the answers provided by all the consultants at the table.Peter and I kept finishing each others’ sentences, and finally the young woman commented on how we were giving the same answers to her questions.

“How long do you think Gwen and I have known each other?” Peter asked, and she guessed quite a few years. Peter’s response brought chuckles from the table, since he had to consult his watch (or was it phone?) to give her the correct figure… in minutes. (We’d actually met just an hour or so before dinner.)

Beth and Peter and I were all at the Independent Analysts Platform in Phoenix two weeks ago, where this photo of Peter was taken on Peter’s iPhone.

In case you don’t recognize the pose, it’s paying homage to Darwin the Data Dude, the fictional guide to the humorous side of Data Governance on the website of the Data Governance Institute. (www.datagovernance.com)

Shortly after Darwin debuted In the summer of 07, a rumor got started that he was modeled after Peter.The truth is that the artist was given a photo of John Lennon and told to “make it look like he works with IT, but cares more about data, systems, wine, and people than techie, geeky stuff.”

So there you have it. Evidently, if John Lennon were alive, well, and working in Information Management and Governance, he would be… Peter Aiken.

At the Independent Analysts Platform, Greg Battas from HP told this story an hour ago:This was back when he was working on the HP HPIT product, and he wanted to know what it would cost to build it. He asked engineering, and his resource there said he’d bet back to him.He didn’t want to wait for an estimate. So he went to HP’s own site, and decided to use a “Click and Buy” self-service approach. He had a list of components, so he just started clicking parts. Laughing, he said he even clicked the button for next day Fedex delivery.

While we were chuckling, he also said that he knew his report would drive someone in marketing crazy — but he wanted the information.

So he called engineering back and said he still wanted a good cost estimate, but it “better not be more than x amount, because he knew where he could get the parts for that amount.”

We all laughed. It was a good story. But it was more than that. Greg was demonstrating several truths that we should all keep in mind:
1. People will do what they need to do to
2. This is true even if they cause problems for someone else. They might feel bad about it, but they’re going to do it anyway if it’s important enough.
3. Putting information out there may lead to unexpected consequences. Sometimes this is good.
4. Smart people think outside of the box.
5. Leaders are impatient. That’s why they’re out front, leading.

For posts detailing capabilities reported by vendors presenting to us, check out Shawn Rogers’ great b-eye blog at http://www.b-eye-network.com/blogs/rogers/

Serena is the name of a software development company. Summer Ficarrotta is the name of their Product Marketing Manager for Business Mashups. She addressed us here at the Independent Analysts Platform in Phoenix. We all know what a mashup is, right? It’s an application made by pulling two or more sets of information together in a dynamic function. According to Summer, some of the benefits of business mashups are that they:
○ Shrink the application backlog
○ Improve productivity throughout your organization
○ Coordinate activities across teams and applications
○ Empower the business to innovate

The Serena product, she says, helps builders of mashups to
○ Design and deploy mashups without coding
○ Provide the strongest mashup governance

Summer points out that sometimes IT staff are concerned about mashups. Her point is that IT needs to provide the right infrastructure and provide best practices.

And it needs to provide governance.

Halleluiah, sister. I’m with you there. That’s so common sense to me - mashups provide great freedom to display information, but such freedom needs to be tempered with careful and considered governance.

Anybody out there have experience in your organization with providing governance for mashups? Let me know how that’s working for you.

For posts detailing capabilities reported by vendors presenting to us, check out Shawn Rogers’ great b-eye blog at http://www.b-eye-network.com/blogs/rogers/.