Supposed to be a joke

Goals are Important

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl2 Comments

A big thing going on in Europe right now is the Euro 2012 football (soccer) championship. 16 national teams are competing for the European Champion title.

People like me not being a subject matter expert may have difficulties seeing above national preferences and evaluating who is the best team. Is it:

  • The team having the highest ball possession percentage,
  • the team with the most handsome legs (my wife says so) or
  • the team with the most expensive players?

Therefore TV channels have experts in the studio. Well, sometimes they also have difficulties seeing above national preferences, but else they can provide you with analysis of a lot of facets about the game and why some things matters more than other things. Even sometimes an expert is nailing it and tells you: “It’s important to score goals”. Oh yes, I think most of us got that already.

It’s the same with reading articles, blog posts and so about data quality and master data management. Experts may have difficulties seeing above brand preferences but anyhow there is a lot of good stuff about different facets of achieving high quality data and doing master data management the right way and even sometimes an expert is nailing it and tells you: “It’s important to support business goals”. Oh yes, …

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Credit Ratings Turned Upside Down

Henrik Gabs LiliendahlLeave a comment

In a recent reform the usual way of expressing credit ratings by assigning AAA as the top rating, AA+ as the next best and so on has been changed.

If we look at sovereign credit ratings being those ratings assigned to countries, the world picture looks somewhat different than before.

The new top rating is LMAO followed by LOL+ and so on. As of 1st April 2012 only three countries have the top rating. These countries are Zimbabwe, Greece and Wales.

The improved Zimbabwean rating is due to a simplification (Keep It Simple, Stupid) in the way of handling currencies. Now the Zimbabwean dollar equals the US dollar. Much easier, indeed.

Until now Greece has been a bit of a scapegoat for the Eurozone problems. With a new way of measuring things that has certainly changed. Already tomorrow German chancellor Merkel must go to Athens and present a plan telling how to pay back the balance.

Wales have until now been rated as part of the United Kingdom. But as a credit bureau spokesman says: “If you have a national soccer team and a national rugby team you should definitely also have your own sovereign credit rating”. As a main reason for the Welsh economic strength most analysts point to the new Welsh shadow currency called Nidwyfynrhoicachufelltithamarianfijystyneudefnyddiowrthfiwedieu – or just short Nidwyfynrhoicachufelltithamarianbasta.

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Some Voter Musings

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl2 Comments

Tomorrow there is a general election in my home country Denmark.

Voter registration

There are different systems of voter registration around the world.

In some countries there are electoral roles being data silos of citizen master data more or less integrated with other citizen master data silos for other purposes as driving license administration, social security and taxation.

In Denmark we have an all-purpose single master data hub for citizens. When we have to vote, the ballots are extracted from the hub based on your age (from 18 on election day) and citizen status (excluding citizens of other countries living or working here).

The political scope

The voter’s role is to select members for the parliament. Then the parliament will select a prime minister.

One of the two most likely candidates for next prime minister is the current one with the nickname “Little Lars”, who came to power when the former one became general secretary of NATO and moved to the HQ in Brussels. Lars is head of the political party called Left (Venstre), which is a right wing party. He is going to defend the welfare state, including universal healthcare and free college.

His main opponent has the nickname “Gucci Helle”.  She is leading the left block. She is going to defend the welfare state, including universal healthcare and free college.

Head of state

As voters we are not trusted to select the head of state. The queen was born to be queen, and her eldest son will be the next king. On the other hand, the members of the Royal Family are not allowed to vote in the election.  This is the exception that confirms the rule.

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Oranges, Apples and Pears go Bananas

Henrik Gabs LiliendahlLeave a comment

My post yesterday about Data Quality Evangelism included the fruit oranges and a comment from Jim Harris added apples to the analogies by using the idiom about comparing apples and oranges.

There are a lot of linguistic musings around the words apples and oranges.

In many languages we use the similar idiom as comparing apples and pears. But it may be geographic depended as in European French it is apples and pears but in Quebec French it is apples and oranges.

In some Germanic languages the fruit orange can be translated as “Chinese apple”. For example the Dutch word is “sinaasappel”  and the Danish/Norwegian word is “appelsin”. In Germany it is “Apfelsine” in the North and “Orange” in the South. The linguistic line across Germany is by the way called the apple-line, but for the opposite reason.

In English a “Chinese apple” is a pomegranate.

The word orange has two meanings in English: A fruit and the color (as they write in American English) or a colour (as they write on the British English).

The two meanings make Google Translate go bananas. When Google translates between languages it does it via English. So if I translate “appelsin” from Danish to Dutch I don’t get “sinaasappel”. Instead I get “oranje”, the Dutch national color.

No wonder Data Quality Evangelism most often isn’t fruitful.

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Data Quality Evangelism

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl5 Comments

There is a famous painting by Leonardo da Vinci with Jesus and the Twelve Apostles having The Last Supper:

Now, most classic historical paintings have anachronisms. In The Last Supper there are oranges on the table, which is strange, since oranges weren’t known in EMEA in the 1st century.  

But, anachronisms aside:

Q: Isn’t it also strange that everyone is on one side of the table?

A: Not at all. It’s like with data quality evangelism: Everyone is on the IT side. The business side has other things to do.

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The Right Mail Order

Henrik Gabs LiliendahlLeave a comment

In the 70’s when I went to high school I also had a job on Saturdays as a postman.

I remember I had to be at the post office very early in the morning, which was hard after a Friday night out. As I wanted to be able to have a few extra hours of sleep before the Saturday Night Fever, it was crucial to get the job done as fast as possible

The first function in the daily process was hand sorting (these were old times) the letters for my route. First all letters was sorted into streets, and then each street was sorted by the house number (I lived in a fairly small town with short streets with mostly single family houses).

When sorting most streets I had two options:

  1. Have the even numbers sorted ascending followed by the odd numbers sorted descending. This was the easy way of sorting but the hard way of delivering later, as I had to move up and down the street.
  2. Sort the numbers in the order the houses was distributed along the street. This was the hard way of sorting as I had to remember the order as even (right side) and odd (left side) numbers wasn’t necessary distributed equally. But the delivery (if sorted properly) was easier, as I could move up the street in one pass and usually continue on the next street down.  

I feel so lucky I was a postman then and not today. A postman today will get the small number of physical letters we send these days sorted optimally by a geocode aware automated mechanism. No chance of learning sorting mechanisms the hard way.

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Bluetooth and Me

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Bluetooth is a wonderful technology that allows me to browse the phone book stored on my cell phone and activate a call from my car cockpit even though my mobile is in my jacket pocket and my hands are on the wheel.

By the way: Bluetooth is a communication standard named after king Harald Bluetooth of Denmark because he united all the Danish tribes a thousand years ago, even though his father, Gorm the Sleepy, probably did most of it. Harald however was the guy who abandoned the Old Norse gods in favor of Christianity leaving Odin and Thor the humiliating fate of becoming American comic and film characters.

History aside, Bluetooth doesn’t do anything more than exposing my party master data hub on the cell phone made up from numerous SIM card changes and outlook synchronizations with all the resulting duplicates and outdated numbers even a data quality geek and master data management enthusiast is wearing.

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It’s Hard to Be a Data Geek

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl6 Comments

Sometimes I, along with other folks in my social network circles and groups, describe myself as a data geek.

Another none anonymous data geek, Rich Murnane, recently started a series of excellent cartoons on his blog about DataGeek’s first days on a new job. Hard work indeed.

Then the data geeky corporate twitter account of IBM Initiate has made a twittpoll asking: Do you consider yourself a data geek or a management geek?

It’s a hard question. Because you know that a lot of things about better data is about better management and it’s much more admirable to be a management geek than a poor data geek.

Anyway I stood firm and admitted that I am a data geek. Because the world has always been crowded with management consultants with little attention to the needs of the data. Someone has to take care about the data. It’s hard, but it’s worth it.

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Big Business

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In a recent blog post called Hamsterdam and Data Anarchy by Phil Simon on The Data Roundtable it is described how rules, policies, and procedures sometimes are suspended in an unusual situation and how dangerous that may be.

I remember being part of such a situation back in the 80’s. The situation also included that I as an IT guy became “the business” and the situation could have been big business for me – or big time jail for that matter.

Quick-and-dirty

My first real job was at the Danish Tax Authorities. The government is always looking for new ways of collecting taxes and at that time a new kind of tax was invented, as a new law enforced taxation on the big money piling up in pension funds.

As the tax revenue was needed quickly the solution was a simple construction for the first year and a more complex permanent construction for the following years.

The burden in implementing the collection on the authority’s side wasn’t that big, so the operating team was basically a legal guy and me, being an IT guy. We collected the names and addresses of a few hundred companies in financial services that might administer pension funds and sent them a letter with instructions about calculating their contribution for the first year and turning over the money.

Money on the table

Because no one else in the organization was involved in the one off solution for the first year the returned statements and checks ended at my desk. So at that time my morning drill was opening envelopes with:

  • A statement that I registered in a little data silo I controlled myself and then passed on to the archive
  • A check that I passed on to the treasury

Some of the checks were pretty big – as I remember what resembles more than 50 million Euros.   

So I did consider an alternative workflow for just one of the big ones. It could have been as this:

  • Deleting the company in the data silo I controlled myself
  • Archiving the statement in my kitchen bin at home
  • Cashing the check for myself

Well, probably I would have been handcuffed when executing activity number three.

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A pain in the …

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl1 Comment

When we move around in the traffic we may have different roles at different times. Sometimes I drive a car, sometimes I’m a pedestrian and sometimes I ride a bicycle. The traffic infrastructure tries to separate these roles by having roads for cars, sidewalks (pavements) for pedestrians and bicycle paths for bicycles. But in intersections these separations meets and creates cases of who’s to have the upper hand and sometimes all three constructions aren’t available, so pedestrians and bicycle riders may use a road made for cars.

I have just completed a short (kind of) holiday where we took our bicycles on a tour around parts of the Baltic Sea coast through four different countries: Denmark, Germany, Poland and Sweden. Our start and end was in Copenhagen, which is known for having extremely good conditions for bicycling coined by the term “Copenhagenization”.     

The quality and availability of bicycle paths varied a lot on the route. Sometimes you felt that the bicycle paths were constructed to make the life of bicycle riders as miserable as possible. When the bicycle path wasn’t there or was too bad we hit the road, which was extremely unpopular among the car drivers. Not at least German Mercedes drivers love their horns.

But I guess it’s nothing personal. When I drive my car I also think pedestrians and bicycle riders are a pain in the …

Such cases of not liking a role you have yourself at another time also applies to a lot of other situations in life. For example I’m not very excited about all the data quality checks and mandatory fields I have to deal with in the CRM system when I have sold a data quality tool or service. I see them as a pain in the …

And oh yes, after finishing the cycling tour I did have some pain…

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