High Confidence in Your Data – IBM Gets Serious
IBM is serious about you having high confidence in your data. Last week, on September 10th, IBM let us in on many aspects of its Big Data strategy. I thought the best part was their focus on Confidence in Big Data.
Big Confidence in Big Data
That was IBM’s message, clearly delivered by Brian Vile in his presentation last Friday at the InfoGov Community call. Readers of this blog know that along with The Robert Frances Group, Chaordix, and the InfoGov community, we are running a Poor Data Quality – Negative Business Outcomes survey. Thus far, we have learned of real and substantial costs to poor data quality, and that business executives see higher costs than do their IT executive counterparts. Not very confidence-inspiring. Garbage in means garbage out. That hasn’t changed since I wrote my first FORTRAN program back in 1968, for an IBM 1620. So what is my old friend IBM planning to do about eliminating poor data quality?
It’s the Governance, stupid…
IBM is right! Confidence in data is essential. Confidence comes from basing decisions on high quality data and getting great results. Governance is key to achieving and maintaining the high data quality for confidence in data, analysis, strategy, and tactics based on that data analysis.
For example, without governance it would be difficult to discuss data sources, lineage, security, and archiving. These are key characteristics of data management and custodianship that give you confidence in your data analytics. Big data really does need quality, OK, sometimes use whatever data you have, but if you have big decisions to make, with big dollars at stake, you will want high confidence in your data.
Six Big Ones…
IBM presented six innovations that should build high confidence in your data. 
From my perspective, the most important is the the Information Governance Dashboard. This was depicted as a set of “Speedos” that give real-time insight into key performance indicators for high quality data. Will this be the device that appears in weekly data governance review calls? Naturally, it is too soon to tell, but I am hopeful. One of the IBM business partners focused on the Information Governance Dashboard is InfoTrellis. I’ll tell you more about their offerings in a future post.
The Bottom Line
This whole Big Data Confidence announcement has convinced me that the sleeping giant has awoken to the sickening state of poor data quality. Perhaps now, something different will happen… the quality of your data will improve. Perhaps you will develop high confidence in your data, after a very long wait. Stay tuned, and I’ll keep you posted.