Gretchen Burnham, a Certified Data Management Professional and Data Governance Business Analyst, has worked in the industry for nearly 15 years. Today, she spends her time in the field working with First San Francisco Partners’ clients focusing on Data Governance and Master Data Management (MDM) initiatives. Gretchen describes her consulting role as one that includes a lot of education, as well…
Establishing a Data Governance program can be a challenge for any large company. Schneider Electric, a global specialist in energy management and automation, was no exception. With offices throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia and a long history of acquisitions, Schneider Electric was faced with customer data issues that were having a measurable impact on its business operations. Schneider Electric…
It’s football season, and that has us thinking about the elements of a great, winning team. Renowned football coach Vince Lombardi, who knew a lot about success on and off the field, once said: “Individual commitment to a group effort — that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.” And we’d like…
Last month, we conducted a “State of Data Governance” survey to better understand what companies are doing to respond to the evolving data landscape. Our questions focused on Data Governance, management and lineage in the organization. Our clients and contacts received the survey, and we heard back from individuals at nearly 60 organizations across the U.S. Our Data Governance (DG) survey…
The Data Insights & Analytics webinar series, our partnership with DATAVERSITY, continued this month with a session on Analytics, Business Intelligence and Data Science. Our Founder and CEO Kelle O’Neal led the webinar, which was sponsored by Looker Data Sciences. Key topics for the webinar included definitions of Business Intelligence (BI), Analytics and Data Science, as well as differences in…
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is designed to strengthen and unify data protection for all individuals within the European Union (EU). With an effective date of May 25, 2018, organizations within the EU and those managing EU citizen data are scrambling to get up to speed on the impending regulation. Almost daily we come across a news story or…
Last year when our CEO Kelle O’Neal shared her thoughts on company culture in How We’re Making “Remote Work” Work, she talked about the importance of communication and cited tools and techniques we depend on. As we’ve added new consultants this year and built out our administrative staff, too, we’re focusing even more on being effective with our communications. Being…
Batman and Robin. Hans Solo and Chewbacca. Mario and Luigi. Just like these famous pairings, so it is for Data Architecture and Data Governance — they’re aligned to support each other in a variety of ways. What’s tops on this data management duo’s list? Their shared goal of creating standards and guidelines to support the enterprise (think: increasing operational efficiency,…
Our CEO and Founder Kelle O’Neal facilitated this month’s webinar, Big Data Analytics — part of the ongoing Data Insights & Analytics educational series, which is a partnership with DATAVERSITY. Kelle kicked off the one-hour webinar with a promise to cover trends and interesting new developments occurring in the world of analytics — and what they offer to the way…
If you’re struggling to implement a successful and sustainable Data Governance program at your organization, you’re in good company. Many companies repeatedly initiate Data Governance (DG) efforts because their first attempt stalled out or fell flat. Another common scenario: a governance program gets off the ground, but the DG area find it challenging to sustain the program and/or demonstrate its…
In December 2015, information management veteran John Ladley and his staff at IMCue Solutions, an enterprise information management (EIM) consultancy firm in St. Louis, merged with First San Francisco Partners (FSFP). Since that time, John has been a member of our firm’s management team overseeing the delivery of our consulting services to clients and being one of the key faces…
How effective is your organization in governing its analytics processes and the responsible analytics teams? Are you taking advantage of analytics derived from Big Data? These are questions we posed to the data management professionals dialed in to the July webinar, Governing Quality Analytics, part of the Data Insights & Analytics educational series from DATAVERSITY. First San Francisco Partners’ John…
Effective communication is key for the launch of any large-scale organizational effort. For firms implementing a new (or revamping an old) Data Governance program, communication may play an even greater role. That’s because Data Governance (DG) can be a foreign-sounding or intimidating term to employees. When you communicate what’s in it for them and why it’s important to govern data,…
Data is abstract. We can’t touch it or feel it, so we form mental concepts of it. Similarly, we find it difficult to pin down data quality with its conflicting definitions and terminology. Yet, there are fundamental concepts of data quality that information management professionals should rely on. Data Quality’s Manufacturing Roots Data quality is difficult to define, in part,…