Data Vault inventor and Founder
IT industry and DW/BI for the past 30 years, consultant and systems architect, building both OLTP and EDW class systems for federal government and commercial enterprises. Trained in SEI / CMMI Level 5 compliance and governance. Expert in big data systems and unstructured information management, agile methodologies, product development.
Inventor of Data Vault – revolutionary business intelligence and analytics framework and solutions.
Specialties: Data warehousing, business intelligence, solving big data problems, sprint planning, tracking and oversight, systems design, and architecture, SEI/CMM Level 5. Experience with BAM, HR, manufacturing, financials, and contracts. I have been involved with cycle time reduction, lean-initiatives, and business best practices.
What attracted you to data management or IT, and why did you choose to pursue this career?
The idea that data presents continuous unsolved challenges. I like to be challenged, and to develop solutions and ideas that meet those challenges.
What has been your greatest career accomplishment so far, and why has it been important to your career?
I have to say, inventing Data Vault many years ago. It’s been a defining moment in my career, as it ushered in the ability to automate data warehousing tasks due to the restart ability, consistency, and repeatable patterns that are the basis of Data Vault. The Data Vault solution also has brought about significant changes in the way we build business intelligence and analytics capabilities.
What are the two or three biggest challenges you face as a data management professional / CDO and how can we address them?
Challenge 1: short attention span of the people working in the industry, leading to laziness, not wanting to follow standards, and not wanting to adhere to governance. Many practitioners want to hit the “easy button”, and have it simply generated, no matter what it is they want. They don’t want to do the work of vetting the generated results for quality, nor do they want to adhere to any standards that are proven to work.
Challenge 2: every individual thinks they know better than the experts, every individual wants to stand up and be an individual – have their own special way of doing things, their own answers. They want to be the rock-star of their company, but the end result is often they build or produce solutions that are unmaintainable, and they don’t document their work, when they move on, the company realizes what a mess was created.
Challenge 3: Data is big, and getting bigger every day, and with the massive growth of data, comes a lack of accountability, and a serious degradation (often) of quality. Companies already have or will have data that is too large to vet properly going forward. The fundamental question is for these companies: how do they know / judge which data is valuable, and which isn’t? Furthermore, how can they figure out what data to “keep” and what to throw away? The answer often is just store it encrypted in the cloud, keep everything, we’ll get to it later if we need to. The problem is, “later” never comes OR it does and then the company has no idea how to locate the data that is being requested, because they didn’t do the hard work to setup a corporate ontology / taxonomy and categorize it all (at least in a loose manner).
How do you see data management / the role of the CDO / IT changing in the next 2 – 3 years?
More knowledge in AI, ML, and more knowledge in security, more knowledge and responsibility to “get the massive data sets catalogued” at least at a major topic level, some sort of categorization will be required. The CDO and IT will continue to be squeezed: better, faster, cheaper, but they will begin to realize that this does not mean they can or should skimp on quality.
Do you have any planned next steps for your career?
Learn more about AI, ML, and algorithms that drive decisions. Try to find out how to “understand” how the AI and ML make their decisions. Learn more about security.
What is the single best piece of advice you have received in your data management / IT career so far? Why has it been so important to you?
Single best piece of advice, know what you don’t know, so you can determine if you need to learn it. If you need to learn it, then focus, focus, focus, go after that knowledge like nothing else exists in the world; to be the best at what you do.
Can you share something about yourself as a person that people wouldn’t know about you?
I grew up surfing, and skateboarding, learned a lot about managing risk, taking calculated risks, and understanding what I didn’t know.
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