I just got back from a few days at the DataFlux IDEAS 2008 Users conference, and it looks like there are some interesting things going on in Cary.

First off, I was invited to provide a tutorial on Data Governance on Monday afternoon, and there seems to be (as expected) a growing interest in operationalizing the data stewardship roles and monitoring more than just the quality of data, but also the performance aspects of the data stewradship activities as well. The ability to define and execute against data qualtiy service level agreements is an aspect of oversight that is gaining momentum.

These ideas were validated at yesterday's keynote talk by Ted Friedman from Gartner. In displaying the data management "hype curve," it seems that we are seeing the ascendancy of two data management activities that I covered: data quality dashboards and scorecards, and active metadata driving business processes.

Another interesting announcement was that SAS has opted to transition its data integration technology (and a significantly-sized support team) to DataFlux under the nom-de-plume "Project Unity" to unify the data integration and data quality/governance offering. This probably enhances DataFlux's ability to compete against those data integration vendors that have acquired data quality technologies.

Lots of good customer case studies also, which, in comparison to last year's set, seems to show maturation among their customer community's approaches to data quality management. Good show!