Color Commentary…

Sep 12, 2011 by Rich Murnane

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is the federal agency responsible for “measuring labor market activity, working conditions, and price changes in the economy.” I stumbled upon a recently posted report titled “Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary,” which I’m very excited to share with you.

The Importance of Compliance

Oct 01, 2010 by Dylan Jones

I find it fascinating to witness the frantic scramble that so many organisations undertake when faced with a punitive compliance directive.

In many cases, the organisation has been ignoring the growing need for a data quality and data governance strategy, then all of a sudden they feel compelled to take decisive action. Funds are miraculously discovered, technology is acquired and specialist resources take the helm on these new data-driven initiatives.

All of this is positive, of course.

The purpose of a compliance directive is to force companies to act responsibly towards customers, staff, environment and shareholders. This is not rocket science, just sound business. By acting diligently and creating complete transparency within your organisation, you invariably discover and resolve many hidden risks, bottlenecks, cash pits, inefficient processes and ineffective staff.

Transparency is a key enabler to compliance directives. By forcing organisations to complete full disclosure of their financial stability and various risk assessments, we can (in theory) move toward prevention of the recent banking failures in the UK and US.

The reason for all this momentum is largely due to executive sponsorship. When directors are faced with the possibility of corporate fines or even imprisonment, then swift action is typically the result.

More Data Please, Part II

Sep 13, 2010 by Rich Murnane

In a previous post, I outlined the reporting requirements set forth here in the US for financial institutions who provide loans under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA), and how the recently passed Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act might change these reporting requirements. In this post I’d like to walk you through the steps I’d put in place if I were on the team of folks in the government who receive this data each year.

Objectives
The objectives for this post are to outline the steps I’d take when receiving the data files, validating the data for correctness, loading the data into a database and providing feedback to both the submitters of the data and to my senior management on the quality of the data.

Before we get started, I’d like to put together a list of assumptions/understandings:

More Data Please…

Aug 23, 2010 by Rich Murnane

Leaving politics aside, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act passed here in the US in July is going to require financial institutions to report more data to the federal government than these folks have been reporting in the past. After doing some Google-Kung-Fu it looks like financial institutions have to comply to a newer version of a guideline called Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) (http://www.ffiec.gov/hmda/guide.htm), and smaller businesses are required to report data under a guideline called ECOA.

Data Governance and Data Protection

Jun 22, 2010 by David Loshin

One consequence of being a data quality practitioner is that my perspective for data governance centers on data requirements, data consumer expectations, and instituting controls for the quality of the data. So I found it interesting (and enlightening) when talking to a colleague at a company that has a staff member with the title “Data Governance Manager” along with a data governance team. He recently lamented to me that he thought it was a problem that when he asked his Data Governance Manager about the company’s data privacy and security policies, that manager had no knowledge of what policies had been defined, who was responsible for their observance, and what procedures and systems were in place for compliance with privacy and security policies.

Business Policies and Data Policies

Jun 15, 2010 by David Loshin

A recent paper and web seminar that I worked on with the DataFlux folks looked at physician payment transparency provisions within the recently passed health care reform bill. In this exercise, our process was to examine the data management impacts associated with the reporting requirements imposed on pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers with respect to any types of payments of transfers of value provided to health care providers.

What was interesting about the research that we did for the paper is that it required a process of iterative analysis and refinement to distill out the critical data dependencies from the legalese that makes up the language of the law. Each successive reading suggested some aspect of the law’s provisions that is related to some information artifact. However, to some extent, I am struggling with how to describe and abstract out that process so that I can articulate it, follow it again in a repeatable manner, and train others to do the same.

The problem with data models

Jun 11, 2010 by Dylan Jones

I often find that carrying out a data quality assessment  is like working on an archaeological site. You slowly unearth the passing of time, piecing together layers of history, trying to make sense of the conflicting information that lies beneath.

One of the more intriguing archaeological finds on our “data digs” is often the data model. We can literally roll…

First Cuts at Compliance

May 25, 2010 by David Loshin

Regulatory compliance is an interesting challenge for a few reasons. First, the imposition of new governmental regulations to which companies must adhere seems to be, to some degree, unfair, mostly because the government is essentially insisting that a company allocate funds towards observing the regulations with limited return on that investment (other than, perhaps, increased good will for not being non-compliant, if you know what I mean). Second, the creation of new regulations to which companies must adhere is also an imposition on the agencies that are supposed to oversee that compliance. It means that they must spend their budget in ensuring that the companies remain complaint and to determine when companies are not compliant and to do something about that noncompliance.

Consider the whole situation from a practical (that is, budgetary) standpoint: For the company, where the managers would like to limit the expenditures on this non-revenue generating activity, the objective is to spend the smallest amount of resources in order to appear to be as compliant as possible. For the government agency, which is probably already stretched thin with a limited budget and is being asked to monitor compliance with no increase in funding, the objective is to identify noncompliance when it appears to pose the greatest risk to citizens.

Increased Reporting vs. Increased Scrutiny?

May 18, 2010 by David Loshin

When I travel, I often will pick up a book at the airport book store; last week  I was traveling back from Seattle and I stopped in the book store and decided to buy a recent book by Malcolm Gladwell called “What the Dog Saw.” I had eyed this book before, and have read his other books. But I had always opted against buying this one because it was a collection of articles that had already been published in the New Yorker; not sure why this turned me off, but this time I bought it, and found one very interesting chapter/article about the collapse of Houston-based energy firm Enron in the early 2000′s.

Of course, after Enron’s unraveling, the claim that the senior managers had withheld information from the employees and stockholders (along with some other spectacular corporate failures such as Tyco, Adelphia, and WorldCom) led to the establishment of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which instituted enhanced standards for financial disclosure and reporting by public companies.