The DOBlog

The IAIDQ is working to develop an industry standard certification/accreditation programme for Information/Data Quality Professionals (similar to the PMI for Project Managers). This is a valuable and significant initiative that will (hopefully) lead to a reduction in the types of issues we see over at IQTrainwrecks.com.

The IAIDQ has set up a blog over at idqcert.iaidq.org to share news and feedback from the Certification development project. Currently there are some good posts there about the first international workshop that was held in October in North Carolina to thrash out the ‘knowledge areas’ that needed to be addressed. That workshop was a key input into the next stage of the project - a detailed Job Analysis study.

Of course, industry defining initiatives like this need to be funded and the IAIDQ is eager that this be a Community lead project “by IQ Professionals for IQ Professionals”, rather than being driven by the objectives of vendors (although vendors are good and the IAIDQ is looking for vendor sponsorship to help this initiative as well). To make this a ‘community’ initiative it was felt that individuals might like to ChipIn a few quid. If you are in the US it is tax-deductible due to the legal status of the IAIDQ (a 501(3) not for profit). The rest of us might just need to be less generous.

I personally think this is a great initiative that will raise standards and objectivity in the field of Information Quality. Please give generously.

This is inspired by a post over on the Crabbling Otter (greetings and felicitations Mr Byrne).

He got the flyer below in to work. Commenters over at the ‘Otter have found upwards of 12 errors. So, for the next few days I’ll be running “The 12 Days of Blogger Christmas”. What I’d like commenters to do here is to suggest the festive (and appropriate) gift that would be sent to Christmastreesdirect.eu in this season of giving.

So, I’ll start the ball rolling….

“On the First day of Christmas, the Bloggers gave to me….

A brand new spell checking dictionary”….

Barack Obama just might be the first ‘Information Age’ President of the US.

The Houdini Project that his team ran has highlighted the value of information, and especially good quality and timely information, when making decisions or trying to gain a competitive advantage. From the details that have leaked out (and while Newsweek get the credit for breaking the story, I found it discussed here a few days ago) it is clear that from the top down there was an understanding of the value of timely and accurate data with additional ‘richness’ of information to help focus resources (ie not calling people who’d already voted or who weren’t going to vote Obama), prioritise effort (ie putting the priority on calling in areas where voter turn out was lower than expected), and generally just getting the edge on the opposition.

On the DailyKos, UMassLefty wrote:

We were plugged in to the GOTV operation throughout the day, and we knew that it was working, that what we were doing mattered.

Ironically, only yesterday I was delivering a presentation on how information quality professionals needed to work with their customers (stakeholders) to make that link between the goals and priorities of the Executive Committee and the actions, deeds and drivers of the people in the front line to give a clear and coherent alignment of information quality to strategy (and vice versa).

The IAIDQ has issued a press release commenting on the value of the information to the success of Obama’s campaign.

As more information emerges about how the Houdini project worked, I’m sure either the IAIDQ or I will be writing more about it.