IAIDQ Blog Carnival, April 2010

I've dusted down the blog today to host April's IAIDQ blog carnival for information/data quality bloggers, a look at some of the month's best blog posts.

In keeping with this blog's focus, I've decided concentrate on posts about data quality (as a data issue) rather than on business or other practices, or on personnel issues; so I've largely bypassed posts about persuading executives to invest in improved data quality, data quality tools within businesses, return on investment and the like, though this is no reflection on the quality of those posts.



We can start with Daragh O Brien, a man who rarely utters a word I don't agree with, and he utters them always with great aplomb. His recounting of the difficulties of matching and moving his contact data from 'phone to 'phone in his post Do we have an App for that? shows well how real people have to grapple with data quality issues on a daily basis.

Also on the theme of data everywhere in our environment, and certainly not just within businesses, is the good Jim Harris' post Data, Data Everywhere, But Where Is Data Quality?. Jim, an obsessive compulsive blogger and independent consultant, speaker and writer looks at the avalanche of data we contend with daily, why its quality matters, and how we need to manage it.

I can't let the carnival go on without a mention of Dylan Jones, editor of Data Quality Pro and a prime mover in getting the importance of data quality recognised. Dylan's post is an Expert Interview with Jill Wanless (author of the Data Quality from the Ground Up blog). So I get to mention two data quality scions in a single paragraph.



I won't generally eat anything more exotic than a chicken and mushroom pie, and you'd have to tie me up and use a cattle prod to get me anywhere near IKEA, but Henrik Liliendahl Sørensen has continued his posts about data diversity with Data Quality and World Food. Henrik's work with, amongst others, Omikron, has given him a good understanding of the importance of understanding global diversity, and he blogs about it regularly.



Finally I'd like to make an honorable mention of Julian Schwarzenbach's final entry in his series The Data Zoo - How data personalities interact. Though I'm breaking my rule here of avoiding blog entries which revolve around data quality within businesses rather than as something generic, Julian's work in sifting and identifying the personalities involved in data quality work is a remarkable series, though I'm stuck with the feeling that I actually belong in each one of the nine categories identified, which is a trifle worrying ...

Apologies again to the writers of the excellent blog entries I had to exclude from this carnival, and I'm looking forward to next month's batch already.