The Business of IQ

A category to collect and collate posts on the business aspects of information quality. Will be used to create a pre-defined view of pages in menu bar.

Data Protection Rake: WHACK!!

So, the Minister for Education is fighting a rear-guard action to justify the method of execution of the Primary Online Database. Get ready for the rakes. Correctly, she is stressing the need for a means to track education outcomes as children move from primary to secondary education, where there is a drop-out rate which is …

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The sound of one bell clapping

Twitter is great. I found myself this evening discussing the psychology of alarms with Rob Karel of informatica. He had tweeted that a car alarm outside his office had been going off for an hour but his brain had filtered it out. This is not an uncommon reaction to bells and alarms and is the …

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Daisy (chain) cutters needed

Brian Honan (@brianhonan on twitter) has been keeping me (and the omniverse) updated via Twitter about the trials and tribulations of Wired.com columnist Matt Honan who was the subject of a Social Engineering attack on his Amazon, Apple, Gmail, and ultimately twitter accounts which resulted in every photograph he had of his young daughter being …

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Lies, damned lies, and statistics

On Monday the 16th January 2012 the Irish Examiner ran a story that purported to have found that 93% of the Irish public “decried” the decision of the Minister for Foreign Affairs to close Ireland’s embassy in the Vatican City State. The article detailed how they had undertaken a review of correspondence released under the …

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Turd Polishing

In the course of a twitter conversation with Jim Harris I used the phrase “turd polishing” to describe what happens when organisations try to implement check-box based data governance or Compliance programmes, or invest in business intelligence or analytics strategies without fixing the data which under pins those strategies addressing the organisational cultural and structural …

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New Data Protection post over on the company site

I’ve just written a new article over on the company website about Director’s liability for data security breaches. An expert in the Sunday Business Post over the weekend was waving a big stick at Company Directors saying that they could become liable for prosecution for security breaches if Ireland transposes the Convention on Cybercrime into …

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Bruce Schneier on Privacy

Via the Twitters I came across this absolutely brilliant video of Bruce Schneier talking about data privacy (that’s the American for Data Protection). Bruce makes some great points. One of the key points that overlaps between Data Protection and Information Quality is where he tells us that Data is the pollution problem of the Information …

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The Who/What/How and Why

Data protection and Information Quality are linked in a number of ways. At one level, the EU Directive on Data Protection (95/46/EC) describes the underlying fundamental principles of Data Protection as “Principles for Data Quality”. While that is great pub quiz content, it helps to be able to make some more pragmatic and practical links …

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Profound Profiling

Over the past few weeks at a number of events and speaking engagements I’ve found myself talking about the multifaceted benefits of Data Profiling from the perspectives of: Complying with EU Data Protection regulations Ensuring Data Migrations actually succeed Enabling timely reporting of Regulatory risks My mantra in these contexts seems to be distilling down …

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Sometimes it is the simplest things…

Yesterday I took some time out from work to help hang some new light fittings at home. Our local handyman/neighbour was doing the hard work as my wife has seen enough of my father’s DIY exploits to have put an embargo on me even looking sideways at power tools. The estimated duration of the job …

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