When working with data management – and not at least listening to and reading stuff about data management – there is in my experience too little work with the actual data going around out there.
I know this from my own work. Most often presentations, studies and other decision support in the data management realm is based on random anecdotes about the data rather than looking at the data. And don’t get me wrong. I know that data must be seen as information in context, that the processes around data is crucial, that the people working with data is key to achieving better data quality and much more cleverness not about the data as is.
But time and again I always realize that you get the best understanding about the data when getting your hands dirty with working with the data from various organizations. For me that have been when doing a deduplication of party master data, when calibrating a data matching engine for party master data against third party reference data, when grouping and linking product information held by trading partners, when relating other master data to location reference data and all these activities we do in order to raise data quality and get a grip on Master Data Management (MDM) and Product Information Management (PIM).
Well, perhaps it is just me and because I never liked real dirt and gardening.
Liliendahl on Data Quality 
…just remember that the dirt from the garden is often easier to wash off than the dirt that results from digging into an organisation’s data 🙂
That is true 😀
Fully agree Henrik. That’s why I use to call myself for a craftsman. Working with Master Data means you’ll be active on the work floor and not the boardroom. But … you need management focus and support.
Absolutely, René. It is a bimodal discipline balancing spending time and focus on the storytelling directed at top level management and at the same being part of the sanitary activities on the floor.