{"id":153,"date":"2010-05-10T16:00:35","date_gmt":"2010-05-10T14:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.smartersoftware.de\/wordpress\/?p=153"},"modified":"2010-05-08T14:37:13","modified_gmt":"2010-05-08T12:37:13","slug":"building-dq-trust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.smartersoftware.de\/wordpress\/2010\/05\/building-dq-trust\/","title":{"rendered":"Have you built your DQ trust today?"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote>\n<p>For German readers: Es gibt eine <a href=\"http:\/\/www.smartersoftware.de\/wordpress\/deutsch\/vertrauen-in-dqm.html\">deutsche Version dieses Blogeintrags<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>In the last time, there have been quite a few posts on using \u201cshame\u201d as a tool for improving data quality. Here are just three from the top of my head:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<div align=\"left\"><a href=\"http:\/\/robpaller.com\/archive\/2010\/01\/a-data-quality-riot-act\/\">A Data Quality Riot Act<\/a> by <a href=\"http:\/\/robpaller.com\/\">Rob Paller<\/a> <\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div align=\"left\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ocdqblog.com\/home\/the-poor-data-quality-jar.html\">The Poor Data Quality Jar<\/a><\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div align=\"left\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ocdqblog.com\/home\/the-scarlet-dq.html\">The Scarlet DQ<\/a>, both by Jim Harris at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ocdqblog.com\/\">OCDQBlog<\/a><\/div>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p align=\"center\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"display: block; float: none; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto\" src=\"http:\/\/farm4.static.flickr.com\/3355\/3495746343_929e448664.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><em><font size=\"1\">Picture by <\/font><\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/24443965@N08\/\"><em><font size=\"1\">Okinawa Soba<\/font><\/em><\/a><em><font size=\"1\">, taken from flickr with a cc license<\/font><\/em><\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve added some comments to these posts that I think that they are missing something. I wasn\u2019t quite able to put my finger to it, not sure how to grab the \u201cmissing thing\u201d, not really able to give it a name. In order to move the discussion forward, I\u2019ve decided to go with \u201cDQ trust\u201d and try to explain my thinking a bit more. Let me know in the comments what you think!<\/p>\n<p>The problem I see with the \u201cpublic humiliation\u201d aspect of what Rob and Jim are describing: It will only work in a certain environment &#8211; when the \u201criot act\u201d gets what I would call a \u201cwink wink, nudge nudge\u201d aspect.&#160; The \u201cculprit\u201d understands why the reaction is coming, but the whole thing is so much over the top that it can\u2019t really be taken seriously. This results in taking the sting out of the \u201cpublic humiliation\u201d aspect and the riot act achieves its purpose.<\/p>\n<p>In order for this to work, there has to be one of two things: Either you have to be a really good comedian (and I\u2019m certainly not) so that you can spring this on a person you\u2019ve hardly ever dealt with before. If your act backfires, you\u2019ll also have to deal with that person\u2019s boss, and I have found humor to decline when moving up the corporate ladder. Pretty risky to rely on that.<\/p>\n<p>That leaves the second option: Your riot act has to have a background to it, and you must have built a reputation as a fervent defender of data quality in your organization \u2013 you must have built a trust in your data quality judgment. This way, a person or his boss can understand that your reaction is aimed at improving data quality, and not at public humiliating data quality villains.<\/p>\n<p>Too often I find that people do not take enough time to build this data quality trust. As they say it takes a long time to build trust, but only a moment to destroy it forever. Here are some ideas of what to do to build the trust:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>reserve judgment on someone\u2019s actions for as long as possible \u2013 try to find out why people do things a certain way before telling them they are idiots<\/li>\n<li>admit that you don\u2019t know everything and try to learn constantly by interacting with different people from different departments to get a 360\u00b0 view on the issues<\/li>\n<li>help people to solve their problems \u2013 then they will be much more willing to help you when you need their support<\/li>\n<li>make sure to explain data quality in terms the person understands \u2013 a business user doesn\u2019t care too much about referential integrity unless you can explain how it affects his daily work<\/li>\n<li>don\u2019t be too academic in your data quality requirements \u2013 it doesn\u2019t make sense to require perfect data quality for data that is never used<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Even with this, whenever a new data quality issue comes and I\u2019m shaking my head why anyone would come up with this harebrained scheme, I ask myself whether I\u2019ve built enough trust to shame the person about it or not. Almost always, I come out on the side of caution and try to be firm on the issue, but avoid assigning personal blame. In the short term, this may not be quite as satisfying as \u201cventing\u201d, but has a much better chance of long-term success.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For German readers: Es gibt eine deutsche Version dieses Blogeintrags. In the last time, there have been quite a few posts on using \u201cshame\u201d as a tool for improving data quality. Here are just three from the top of my head: A Data Quality Riot Act by Rob Paller The Poor Data Quality Jar The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[30],"class_list":["post-153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","tag-dqtrust"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.smartersoftware.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.smartersoftware.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.smartersoftware.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.smartersoftware.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.smartersoftware.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=153"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.smartersoftware.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":158,"href":"http:\/\/www.smartersoftware.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153\/revisions\/158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.smartersoftware.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.smartersoftware.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.smartersoftware.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}