Mr. Vandeventer will be speaking at the Indianapolis DAMA conference on April 17th at 9:45 am.  For more information on location & parking please visit www.damaindiana.org

The Human Factor of Data

In this session we will discuss the metadata category of people, and how creating this category in your metadata strategy can deliver incredible value in your journey towards an improved state.  We will review a few techniques that our firm has used to visualize and categorize the people that are affiliated with organizational data, what they care about and why they are affiliated with certain data.

Abstract

Data as an organizational category is certainly not a new thing.  However, the way in which people have thought about, referenced, used and managed data is quickly changing in almost every industry.  This highly correlated relationship between data and people is often the most overlooked factor when trying to improve the many aspects of an organization including business process improvement, software development, business intelligence, analysis and strategic decision making.  Think back to the projects you have been involved in, and seen failure.  In many of those cases the true root-cause to failure was a result of something to do with the organizational data.  As discussed in one of our other articles, The Paradigm Shift, data can be observed as the lowest common denominator between people, tools and process.

With both process and technology, the relationships between them are fairly black and white.  But with people, the relationships become very grey, ambiguous and they constantly move.  The people category is one of the most significant that over time will lead to very expensive data to maintain, which ultimately leads to:

• an non-optimized data management organization that can?t meet its demands for new ?big-data? types of requests from the business
• an inadequate SDLC process that doesn?t deliver anything on-time
• lack luster profitability due to being beat by the competition on market share

In this session we will review a technique borrowed from consumer marketing, to identify the ?Data Market? and the demographics of that market ? what do they care about and why?  This powerful technique provides the first critical step in establishing the people category of metadata, which provides easy access to the names of individuals that can do something about the data they are accountable for or care about.