Blog: Jill Dyche

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Generating the DQ Buzz

In which attending a movie premier provokes Jill into musing about data quality. (Poor Jill)

My friends Brett and Pam made a movie. The movie is called My Date with Drew, and it’s about a guy who’s had a crush on Drew Barrymore since he was a little kid and how he has thirty days to get a date with her. It’s a great “concept,” as they say in Hollywood.

I attended a premier of the movie last year and pronounced it the “sleeper hit” of the summer box office and heartily congratulated Brett and Pam, and their producer, Andy, for making a really sweet-but-not-cloying film.

But My Date with Drew, per the popular Hollywood vernacular, didn’t have legs. It was a box office flop. While those involved all have their theories about why, my take on it was that the distributors didn’t have the patience to market the movie in a way that would generate lasting buzz. There were a few radio plugs, but otherwise everyone was counting on word-of-mouth. The buzz never spread.

This sort of reminds me of data quality efforts. (I know. It seems like a stretch right now, but bear with me.) Lots of them launch with enthusiasm, optimism, and scads of goodwill. The assumption is: As soon as a few people see the value of all this great data, everyone will jump on the bandwagon! It’s sort of the “If you build it, they will come” of data management. But most of the time, if you build it and don’t generate the requisite buzz, they won’t even know.

Data quality efforts often start with data audits or assessments, and the good ones define data and business rules that make their way into production systems and analytical applications. But, devoid the ongoing enrichment of the data via additional data and ongoing cleansing and refinement, data quality initiatives quickly lose their luster. Some of them—to use another Hollywood metaphor—go straight to video.

It’s important to socialize data enrichment as a must-do, and keep at it. In fact, it’s important to generate buzz for all data quality efforts, including assessments, audits, and business user data acceptance. You might only get one shot.

Oh, and My Date With Drew is out on DVD. I heartily recommend renting it!

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