In the ongoing Olympic Games one often displayed list is the list of medals per nation.
The list reminds me about the occasional analyst report ranking of Data Quality tools and Master Data Management (MDM) solutions. The latest one is fresh pressed as told in the post called Product Information Management is HOT for Business by Ventana Research, where the PIM vendors are ranked with Stibo Systems being the most HOT.
The counting of medals in the Olympic Games in London this afternoon looks like this:
As expected the top race is between the big teams from United States and China just as the mega vendors of tools also always receives good rankings by analysts though with a few exceptions as reported in the post The Data Quality Tool Vendor Difference, where the Gartner MAGIC Quadrant is compared with the ranking from Information Difference.
As often seen the home team, Great Britain and Northern Ireland, is also doing very well. With tools we also see that the Most Times the Home Team Wins despite of analyst ranking when a local client selects a tool.
Other big teams as Russia, Japan and Australia are currently struggling to get more gold medals to climb the list if ranked by gold (instead of total number of medals). Perhaps we will see a closer race with more teams in the last week just as expected with MDM tools as reported in the post Photo Finish in MDM Vendor Race.
The smaller nations often does it better in a small range of disciplines, like Ethiopia in running and Denmark in rowing and sailing resembling the situation described in the post Who is not Using Data Quality MAGIC, as there are plenty of Data Quality tools out there very feasible in certain tasks and local circumstances.
Liliendahl on Data Quality 
Henrik, Thank you for this great example.
Whether it is about the Olympic Games or the ranking of software products, lists such as the above always leave a bad taste and cry for a better method to evaluate the winner (here: the leading nation).
Alternatively, the nations could be ranked by the total number of medals (which makes gold, silver and bronze equally important),
and therefore does not seem to be right neither. Okay, let’s assign a weight to each type of medal and rank nations by the weighted sum, but can we agree on the weighting factors? And is it anyway fair to compare large nations with smaller countries? So maybe we should calculate the number of medals per participating athletes of each nation or compare to their number of residents?!
Way off the mark – the simple, unspoken rule is “The winner takes it all” – and that’s what counts (and what is counted here).
Unfortunately, such one-dimensional evaluation of software products (and even a two-dimensional as preferably published by analysts) does not do any justice to the multiple influence factors in an individual business environment. Nevertheless, at the end of a software evaluation, deciders expect a message that is simple and clear, and simplification is allowed if it does not change the principal outcome.
(Switching back to the Olympics and the above nation ranking: Even the introduction of reasonable weighting factors will not change the result which are the three leading nations!)
This been said – continue to enjoy the Olympic Games!
Great example, Henrik
Who cares about the medal count when you can do some data cleansing?! In all seriousness, the US needs to get back into 1st place for the medal count. Lets beat China!
Thanks Axel and Richard.
Axel, yep, selecting a tool is not as simple as taking the top one in any analyst ranking. You must do your own requirement fulfillment and testing.
Peter Parker (or is it Spider-Man?): I guess you’re trying to do data quality tool marketing the easy way by this link building for HelpIT.