Category: Learning by Teaching

  • Cripes, the blog has been name-checked by my publisher…

    TwentyMajor isn’t the only blogger in the pay of a publisher (I’m conveniently ignoring Grandad and the others as Irish bloggers are too darned fond of publishing these days. If you want to know who all the Irish bloggers with publishers are then Damien Mulley probably has a list)!

    I recently wrote an industry report for a UK publisher on Information Quality strategy. The publisher then swapped all my references to Information Quality to references to Data Quality as that was their ‘brand’ on the publication. I prefer the term Information Quality for a variety of reasons.

    As this runs to over 100 pages of A4 it has a lot of words in it. My fingers were tired after typing it. Unlike Twenty’s book, I’ve got pictures in mine (not those kind of pictures, unfortunately, but nice diagrams of concepts related to strategy and Information Quality. If you want the other kind of pictures, you’ll need to go here.)

    In the marketing blurb and bumph that I put together for the publisher I mentioned this blog and the IQTrainwrecks.com blog. Imagine my surprise when I opened a sales email from the publisher today (yes, they included me on the sales mailing list… the irony is not lost on me… information quality, author, not likely to buy my own report when I’ve got the four drafts of it on the lappytop here).

    So, for the next few weeks I’ll have to look all serious and proper in a ‘knowing what I’m talking about’ kind of way to encourage people to by my report. (I had toyed with some variation on booky-wook but it just doesn’t work – reporty-wort… no thanks, I don’t want warts).

    So things I’ll have to refrain from doing include:

    1. Engaging in pointless satirical attacks on the government or businesses just for a laugh, unless I can find an Information Quality angle
    2. Talking too loudly about politics
    3. Giving out about rural/urban digital divides in Ireland
    4. Parsing and reformatting the arguments of leading Irish opinion writers to expose the absence of logic or argument therein.
    5. Engaging in socio-economic analysis of the fate of highstreet purveyors of dirty water parading as coffee.
    6. Swearing

    That last one is a f***ing pain in the a**.

    If any of you are interested in buying my ‘umble little report, it is available for sale from Ark Group via this link.. . This link will make them think you got the email they sent to me, and you can get a discount, getting the yoke for £202.50 including postage and packing (normally £345+£7.50p&p. (Or click here to avoid the email campaign software…)

    And if any of you would like to see the content that I’d have preferred the link in the sales person’s to send you to (coz it highlights the need for good quality management of your information quality) then just click away here to go to IQTrainwrecks.com

    Thanks to Larry, Tom, Danette, the wifey for their support while I was writing the report and Stephanie and Vanessa at Ark Group for their encouragement to get it finished by the deadline.

  • Conferences and me for the end of 2007…

    Conference season is upon us in the Information Quality Community…

    At the end of September I’m off to Las Vegas to deliver a presentation at the IAIDQ’s North American conference the IDQ 2007 Conference.

    At the end of October I’m off to sunny London for the IRMUK Data Management and Information Quality Conferences. This will be my sixth year at this conference and my fourth as a presenter. This year I hit the ‘big leagues’ with a 3 hour tutorial on some of the legal aspects of Information Quality, going head to head with Larry English (amongst others)on the time table.

    Then in November the Irish CoP of the IAIDQ, the IQ Network will be hosting our IQ Forum… we’re planning it to co-incide with World Quality Day on the 8th of November to tie in with some IAIDQ events that will be taking place world wide.

    Who knows, maybe I’ll meet somebody from Dell at one of those conferences who might be able to fix my laptop problem before Christmas. 😉
    That would be nice.

  • IQ Trainwrecks.com

    The IAIDQ, an organisation I’m involved in for Information & Data Quality, has launched IQTrainwrecks.com as a resource to collate and comment on media stories highlighting the cost and impacts of non-quality information.

    Here’s an example of one of their posts. Our Electoral Register features there as do a few other stories. The IAIDQ team hope that this site will evolve into a focal point for informed comment on the real costs and impacts of poor information quality.