I wanted to write another Christmas themed blog this year, but I have been extremely busy working on some exciting new initiatives which you will hear more about in the new year. But given that I had great feedback to this blog last year and I have many new followers who will not have read it, I have decided to repost A Data Christmas Carol...

For the third in my series of Data Governance interviews, I am really pleased that Jim Orr kindly agreed to answer my questions. I was lucky enough to meet Jim at the MDM and Data Governance Summit in London earlier this year.

Now, data definitions are something I feel very strongly about (and I think you would be very surprised if I said otherwise). After all how can we hope to govern or manage our data, if we don't even know what it is supposed to mean? So at the appropriate point in every data governance initiative, I get the Data Stewards and Data Owners to start drafting and approving definitions for the data which they own. Now this sounds easy, but you would be surprised how difficult it can be to actually put into practice. I've been to many lengthy workshops to try to define what "customer" means and there's been some painful sessions trying to agree whether "products" and "services" were the same thing...

In all aspects of our lives we are influenced by people we consider to be experts. My experiences with data governance has been no different. I continue to gain knowledge from others who work in this space. I thought that you might also be interested to glean some insight from the data governance gurus who have inspired me over the years and I am very excited to start this series of blogs with an interview with Gwen Thomas.

Data today is getting bigger, more widely available and changing more quickly than ever before. We are working in a data filled world where another new data initiative seems always just around the next corner!

According to the recent Moody's Analytics survey titled "Solvency II: A field of missed opportunities?" the European insurance industry is still struggling to meet the requirements of the Solvency II regulation. The survey highlighted three challenging areas, one of which was data quality management.

The very nature of my job means that I get to write a lot of formal documents. These are I have to admit not the most scintillating read, in fact a Head of Compliance once told me that Data Governance documents are always so dry and boring (talk about people in glass houses and stones!) To be fair he did deliver this statement with a wry smile and he made a very valid point...