Military Precision

I found an interesting article on the application of a US Military style to IT Systems Management, as written by someone now in IT who had spent a long time in the Army.
http://www.itsmsolutions.com/newsletters/DITYvol4iss39.htm
My first thought was "Great, but let's not limit ourselves to ITSM".

The upshot of the article was a three-principled approach that serves the military well - although it is rarely spelled out - you need Focus, Discipline, & Consistency. Those three basic principles apply even more so to any data quality exercise - whether you want to have a 'military' style or not.

Focus
You, & everyone who works on your project, need to know what you're trying to achieve & how you plan to achieve it. Never let your plans be hidden from those who will follow them. Never let your goals drift without changing the plan (or vice versa). Focus is, in general, how to achieve goals, & data quality is very much a goal-driven exercise. There is a goal of improving business effectiveness through governance of information. There is no end goal, in that you will never achieve the Nirvana of not having to do any more, but results are seen when the cost of acquiring information is lowered or else the profit from its use is increased.

Discipline
To keep focused, you need to be disciplined. You need to be committed to those goals, that plan. It must come as second nature to drive data quality forward, & this is something that does not come 'naturally'. It's all about pushing yourself & others until you are satisfied with the results. Discipline is what ensures that, having implemented some data quality projects with success, you don't stop, but press on to the bigger problems, the more far-reaching ones. Discipline lets you expand your thinking without being overwhelmed by complexity.

Consistency
Consistency has to be a mantra to anyone in data quality. Data itself must be consistent, & have use consistent with its quality (& sources). Beyond that, the implementation of processes governing data quality must also be consistent. The same approach (dare I use the term 'best practices') should be seen in all applications to similar problems. All practitioners in the project should embrace a set of solutions sufficiently applicable across the enterprise. The principles on which small-scale solutions are implemented should reflect how large-scale solutions can be approached. This just makes common sense.

These three intertwine.
You need discipline to be consistent & stay focused. You need consistency to support discipline & provide focus. You need focus to apply consistency & be disciplined.

However
I can hear the nay-sayers already "But I don't have military personnel - I have a team of professionals". My response is simple - ever hear of a professional soldier? It doesn't actually matter that your team don't do push-ups before breakfast, or that they don't call you "Sir" or "Ma'am" & haven't had a way of life drilled into them for years. What is important is that they (& you) follow the principles, & any intelligent professional can see the advantages of doing so.

Why Are We Here?

I know why I'm here, but why are you?

There could be many reasons, such as:

• you misunderstood the blog title, & realised too late from the web address
• purely accidental
  
• you actually have an interest in what I say
• I told you to read this (& you always do what I say - "Hi team!")

So, before I lose what precious little audience I'm likely to ever acquire, I'll point out that the point of this blog is to regale you with more stories about my professional life, & in this case in the area of data quality. OK, so there go a few more eyeballs.

I won't lie - my content will be as accurate as I hope someone's customer data is. I will remove duplication, cleanse the fields, enrich records with extra attributes, & then correlate matches between customers with a myriad relationships.

In an altruistic sense, I hope that this makes the information more useful. In a modest sense, it's simply eating my own dogfood.

I will stray from the point, because sometimes you don't know how useful your information truly is until you try to use it & get the great 'a-ha' moment that explains why there are four separate places for storing addresses in each customer record.

OK, I'm going back to the first statement. I'm here not because I'm altruistic, so much as because I'm arrogant enough to believe that sharing my experience is good for you. I know it's at least cathartic for me.