Data Management & Decision Support

IQCP, a means to an end - it is all about quality

May 2011 I was given an opportunity to be part of the first group of pioneers that field-tested the IQCP program. IQCP stands for Information Quality Certified Professional and is organized by IAIDQ - the International association for Information Quality and Data Quality.  To be fair; I really do not like certifications. It is said that with certification, clients can have some kind of objective measurement regarding knowledge and skill. Well, for the majority of certifications this is utterly deceiving.

That being said, why did I go for IQCP?

For one thing; IAIDQ is a not-for-profit organisation and vendor-neutral. People involved in IAIDQ are people with a passion to spread the word with regard to quality in general and Information Quality in particular. 

Second; the certification process was extremely well prepared, grounded in known research and adheres to widely accepted standards and regulations such as the ISO/IEC 17024 and the Standards for the Accreditation of Certification Programs, published by the USA National Commission for Certifying Agencies (NCCA, 2002).

Third; I was not mainly interested in the certification as such....To put in poetic; I was interested in the journey, not the destination. The IQCP certification is based on a reference list of books and articles, carefully selected by people who know their stuff. The certification was a ‘carrot on a stick’ to me, pressuring me to actually study and invest time. The deadline was end of July 2011 - I have never in my life read so many books, but I have never in my life been so authentically interested in a subject as well. I just kept reading, because there is so much clever stuff written out there.

Fourth and maybe the most important reason; in may 2011 I also happened to follow the legendary PSL (problem solving leadership) workshop given by Jerry Weinberg, Esther Derby and Johanna Rothman. What I have learned is immense and influences me daily. The root of this workshop is - in my opinion - founded in quality principles; learning, continuous improvement, root-causes, self organizing team, people, communication, understanding the problem, understanding context and so much more. The people I met in this workshop were incredible and a huge inspiration. A lot of the attendees came from the world of context-driven testing and agile software development. Both - in my opinion - strongly rooted in quality principles. 

It somehow all got together when I was asked to participate in the first batch of people to go for IQCP.

For me; IQCP was the means to an end - I have studied amazing books (for a reference list download this pdf) go to written by people like Edwards Deming, Joseph Duran, Jerry Weinberg, Kaoru Ishikawa, Masaaki Imai, Richard Wang and so many more. My library has grown very rapidly lately and I have still so much more to read (learn). Somehow, all I have read, learned and still learning are pieces of a puzzle that fit seamlessly in my field of expertise #datamanagement #decisionsupport #datagovernance #dataquality #datavault #architecture #softwaredevelopment.

The journey never ends....

My gratitude goes to Tom Breur, IAIDQ, Jerry Weinberg, Esther Derby, Johanna Rothman, those crazy canadians ('it is what it is'), Testsidestory, Olav, Markus, Griffin and so many more.

ps. I passed the exam.....I am now an Information Quality Certified professional 

 

Why Data Vault is supported by all ETL tools

Recently a discussion raged on LinkedIn regarding the 'ETL tools that support Data Vault OUT OF THE BOX' (link). I gotta be honest - I was annoyed by the discussion and was stupid enough to display this  by commenting kind of harshly. I would like to apologize to everyone and especially to Daan.

In this blogpost I would like to explain my point of view regarding this question. 

In the above mentioned discussion I commented very briefly 'All ETL tools support Data Vault". Allow me to explain this by paraphrasing an argument that was also used by Daan in the subsequent comments. He mentioned that technology brought about efficiency gains in the last 20 to 30 years. I agree with that, the data is quite clear about it ;-). Trying to explain these gains I leave to applied science, but I would like to take one tiny piece of the puzzle and put it in the context of my remark that 'all ETL tools support Data Vault'.

One of the 'variables' in the function of this tremendous leap - in my opinion - is uniformity. Organizing uniform systems (I use the term 'systems' in the broadest sense - People, Technology, Processes) opened the door towards repeatability, predictability, limiting waste and improving quality. In writing this I think Dr. W. Edwards Deming would agree with me.

Now, back to the subject of ETL and Data Vault. With Data Vault we design the system of modeling and logistics of data in advance. Bothg go hand in hand. What we want to achieve is uniformaty as much as we possibly can. Uniformity in modeling, balanced with the uniformity in loading. 

Let me elaborate some more.

In Data Vault and more generally speaking in 'systems thinking', all objects in a system are interrelated. How I construct a data model has a strong impact on the way I (can) construct the loading (ETL). With Data Vault we standardize the data model as much as we can (there are quite some heuristics in Data Vault, it should not be applied in some dogmatic way), in a limited number of constructs (hub, link, sat). But we also design the loading constructs, which are also extremely limited in number (hubload, linkload, satload). Every load construct has got a standardized pattern, see the figure regarding the pattern for a hub load.

If I were to translate this to SQL it would be something like: INSERT <distinct values> to HUB where NOT EXIST in HUB. Of course any ETL tool would support such a simple construct! Data Vaults are thus being build with SSIS, Informatica, InfoSphere, Business Objects, Pentaho,SAS etc...

Please be advised that in real live Data Vault implementations the above is a simplified example. The principles however remain unchanged;

- A limited number of loading patterns

- The patterns are standardized in type

- The patterns are simple

- The patterns can be executed asynchronous

- The type of patterns can make use of parallel loading

I would like to summarize the above with two words; uniformity and automation. Because of uniformity in modeling and logistics we open the door towards repeatability/automation. Making it a lot cheaper to maintain, but also easy to change or supplement (testability is designed in the system, as well as repairability). Agile software development find great support by these kinds of systems (this is worthy of an entirely new blogpost ;-)).

We now can design a predictable system of loading data in a data model. We have created a uniform structure of the data in the data warehouse, opening the way for more uniformity towards Kimball datamarts as well (be it in-memory, on file, virtualised, etc..).

Uniformity and automation have ignited a wave of innovation in the Netherlands. Innovation led by independent consultants and consultancy firms - that saw great opportunity in the daily problems they face - to take the data logistics to a new level of automation; metadata driven ETL.

(want to know more - come to the Data Vault automation seminar, October 6. Various suppliers of Data Vault automation software are talking and showing their stuff. The organizers decided to keep entrance fees extremely low (100 euro) in order for everyone to contribute, learn and improve themselves and the industry - register now)