If you believe like I do that proper data management can change the world, then you have to start wondering if it’s time for all us data quality professionals to stand up and start changing it.
It’s clear that everyone organization, no matter what the size or influence, can benefit from properly managing their data. Even charitable organizations can benefit with a cleaner customer list to get the word out when they need donations. Non-profits who handle charitable goods can benefit from better data in their inventory management. If food banks had a better way of managing data and soliciting volunteers, wouldn’t more people be fed? If churches kept better records of their members, would their positive influence be more widespread? If organizations who accept goods in donation kept a better inventory system, wouldn’t more people benefit? The data asset is not limited to Fortune 1000 companies, but until recently, solutions to manage data properly were only available to the elite.
Open source is coming on strong and is a factor that eases us to donate the data quality. In the past, it many have been a challenge to get mega-vendors to donate high-end solutions, but we can make significant progress on the data quality problem with little or no solutions cost these days. Solutions like Talend Open Profiler, Talend Open Studio, Pentaho and DataCleaner offer data integration and data profiling.
In my last post, I discussed the reference data that is now available for download. Reference data used to be proprietary and costly. It’s a new world – a better one for low-cost data management solutions.
Can we save the world through data quality? If we can help good people spread more goodness, then we can. Let’s give it a try.
