April 21 in Manhattan. I look forward to meeting and sharing my perspective on modernizing information strategy from the related disciplines of data warehousing, business intelligence, analytics, data quality, operational business intelligence and master data management.

There's been another data security breach. This one at Sweetbay Supermarket. They join Hannaford, Agilent, Harvard University, Pfizer, Presbyterian Intercommunity Hospital, Georgetown University and others as the latest companies where one of the various forms of data breaches has occured.

With lawyers pouncing immediately with class-action suits on the perpetrators, fines and shame, why does the vast majority of the data which is interesting to theives still unencrypted and vulnerable? My Gartner Top 10 review didn't include encryption, not because it should not be there, but because I have yet to see much being done about it. I'm looking for the tipping point, like about 1988 in the credit card business, where credit cards companies got serious about fraud and made it reduce dramatically, to levels it has stayed at ever since.

Perhaps data breach has become so common, it's not viewed as problematic.

These events are not going away anytime soon.

I'm sure there's some value in ITIL, the IT Infrastructure Library, but I'm just having a hard time with the definition. It seems like it could be describing anything...

"ITIL is the most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world. ITIL provides a comprehensive and consistent set of best practices for IT service management, promoting a quality approach to achieving business effectiveness and efficiency in the use of information systems.

ITIL is based on the collective experience of commercial and governmental practitioners worldwide. This has been distilled into one reliable, coherent approach, which is fast becoming a de facto standard used by some of the world's leading businesses."

Technorati tags: ITIL

I have a new white paper available. It's sponsored by Business Objects and titled "Modernizing and Advancing Information Management Across the Enterprise." In the paper, I try to put information management leadership, the data warehouse, operations and analytics into a modern context.

I talk about the necessity and structure of information leadership, including new concepts of an Information Management Competency Center and Information Management Governance. I talk about the 2 directions data warehouses can go now and federating and consolidating those warehouses. Finally, there's where analytics are going to be coming from and some of the analytic value of modern ERP.

In each of the 4 areas (organization, data warehouse, operations, analytics), I give you a "checklist" of the most relevant questions to ask of your shop and seek answers to.

The paper is available at this link or on my channel here at the B-eye-network.

I'll be speaking on "MDM ROI and Justification" at the MDM Summit this Sunday, March 30 from 6:30 - 8:00 in the night school program at the San Francisco Hilton.

Why would you want to do such a thing? No, I don't mean come to the session, I mean MDM itself. Come to find out. The top six frameworks for MDM justification will be presented. Link.