A recent
post by Daragh O Brien about the International Association for Information and Data Quality (IAIDQ) and its future got me
thinking. I’ve never been deeply
involved in the IAIDQ, unlike Daragh, but I was also a charter member, and I
have experienced a definite change recently. Or, perhaps, experienced that I
was no longer experiencing anything, if you get my drift.
Many of the
people I knew who were involved in the early years of the IAIDQ have retired or
moved on, and requests to me for information, articles and so on from the
current leadership have dropped to nothing. Which may not be surprising, as
they probably don’t know me from Adam. Indeed, as Daragh points out, a new
edition of the Journal has become as rare as a web form which can correctly
collect address data from more than one country (i.e. almost non-existent!).
Members used to have a vote on members of the committee – that seems to have
been quietly dropped too.
I know that
Daragh won’t agree, but I began to be concerned when the organisation started
to busy itself creating “Information Quality
Certified Professional” (IQCP) qualification. What’s it for? I am a firm
believer in educating people about data quality, but I don’t see how a qualification
is a useful part of that apart from filling up space on a CV. I have no idea
what the qualification entails – my services when it was being formulated weren’t
required – but my
impression is that it deals essentially with theory and not practice. And it’s clear to me that those at the doing
end of this data quality thing have no better understanding of data quality and
how to achieve it than they did ten years ago. In fact, as businesses perceive
that they need to obtain and manage ever larger amounts of data, even though
often they don’t, accuracy and quality are diminishing – gather enough data and
take a swipe at it, and you’ll hit a few targets on the way. Maybe the IQCP
qualification is useful for some, and shouldn’t be harmful for others, but it
does seem to me to have become the central focus of an organisation that should
be doing more than counting the number of paying students they can hustle through
an exam.
I don’t know
if the IAIDQ is dead. I’m not close enough to it and they seem not to want to
be too close to me. But one thing I do know. Much earlier this year I received
an e-mail requesting that I renew my membership. Instead of immediately doing
so, I cogitated on what I was getting out of the IAIDQ (nothing I could think
of) and so, in straitened times, I decided to put off the decision on whether to
renew until they sent a reminder.
I’m still
waiting.
If an
organisation dedicated to data quality can’t manage its own data, doesn’t that
say something?
