How tasty is your data quality cheese?

There are a number of analogies for issues associated with data quality. Ken O’Connor’s recent blog post likened data quality to the quality of water in a river. I also sometimes use an analogy based on the quality of water in a swimming pool.

A different analogy that I use, and is the subject of this blog post, is to liken your data to a piece of cheese!

Making performance improvement real

Last week I visited Haldex Concentric in Birmingham who manufacture pumps for commercial vehicle engines. They are shortlisted for an award at the Midlands Excellence Awards, to be announced this week.

They have instigated a continuous improvement approach to improving their productivity using both Six Sigma and Lean approaches. This allows them to clearly demonstrate their improvement in productivity over time. Their approach to reporting business performance demonstrates both simplicity and effectiveness.

Business Efficiency Tools – Stronger in combination?

As a believer in taking the medicine I prescribe I’m always on the look out for opportunities to develop and improve my skills. Hence I recently attended an event at Midlands Excellence where Julian Beaney led a very informative morning discussing the various business efficiency tools in common use.

I admit to being a bit of a cynic about putting all my eggs in one basket when it comes to delivering improvements. I’ve seen too many people try and blind their customers with science by slavishly following a set route rather than remembering what the aim of the task is. Hence I was also very interested to see what other practitioners would say about the various tools.

Why application based user groups do not work

Many larger organisation with enterprise wide applications set up user groups to promote application usage, to help resolve system issues and to help plan future enhancements to the application. These groups, in my experience, do not deliver suitable business benefits and can either become a ‘talking shop’ or an excuse to berate the IT department/directorate consequently, the wider business does not see them as adding value.

In this blog post I expand on the nature of the problem and make suggestions for a better approach.

Enigma and Bletchley Park – Lessons for today

I went to a lecture by Dr. Mark Baldwin yesterday on the Enigma encryption machine used by Germany during World War 2 and the work of Bletchley Park in breaking the Enigma codes. The successful breaking of the codes has been stated as having shortened the war by around two years.

If you are not familiar with the Enigma encryption machines, they used a combination of rotors which encrypted and decrypted letters, had 26 keys for data entry, illuminated letters to provide the output and used a number of plugs which could further strengthen the encryption.

What fascinated me were a number of common factors which provide lessons that are still very relevant today:

• The balance of complexity and simplicity
• Development of process
• Overcoming the impossible