Data Quality Mondegreens

Jan 11, 2012 by Jim Harris in Data Quality

Regular readers are familiar with my propensity to discuss data quality topics using song lyrics (and thankfully on only rare occasions, I sing a song).  A mondegreen is the mishearing, or misinterpretation, of a song in a way that gives it a new meaning.  In this blog post, I will share some of my favorite mondegreens about data quality, and some contributed via Twitter last week.

Let’s start with a few of the most common misinterpretations of famous songs, such as The Beatles song Eight Days a Week, which was about a defective calendar dimension in the enterprise data warehouse, What’s Your Name by Lynyrd Skynyrd about their high school jobs as data entry clerks, and Return To Sender by Elvis Presley, about postal address validation – thank you very much.

And, of course, the two sides of the organizational change management challenge was expressed by Bruce Hornsby with The Way It Is and Twisted Sister with We’re Not Gonna Take It.

Now for some of the more frequent mondegreens, the mishearing of a song’s title or lyrics, such as Donny and Marie Osmond explaining how collaboration works: A Little Bit Business, A Little Bit IT, Rich Murnane and James Taylor lamenting: “I’ve seen Fire, Data and Rain, I’ve seen Data Quality errors I thought would never end,” which, of course, inspired Pink Floyd to advocate the need for improved data quality education with Another Defect in the Data, which included the lyrics:

“If you don’t have any quality data, then how can you have any pudding?”

Or Joshua Buckler and Bob Marley calling us to take action: “One Love, One Heart, Let’s Get Together and Clean Data!”  Especially with a maturing data quality industry making possible the AC/DC vision of Dirty Data Cleansed Dirt Cheap and For Those About to Cleanse Data (We Salute You).

2012 is the time for your organization to embrace data quality best practices, and finally overcome the enterprise data quality apathy that Nirvana lamented in their song Smells Like Data Spirit:

“We find it’s hard, good data’s hard to find.

Oh well, data quality whatever, never mind.”

What Say (or Sing) You?

Please share your own data quality mondegreens by posting a comment below.  And if you are a Twitter user, then also tweet your data quality mondegreens with the hashtag: #DQSong

Tags: Data Quality