Businesses rely heavily on data and information in making important business decisions but pay little attention to the health of their data quality and the risks, issues and costs associated therewith.
InfoBlueprint, a specialist in data management and information quality, will co-host a breakfast briefing in mid-April, in conjunction with Informatica and Knowledge Integration Dynamics, to address these issues towards better business intelligence (BI).
Bryn Davies, Managing Director of InfoBlueprint, speaker at the forthcoming breakfast briefing, says: "One of the major stumbling blocks to delivering ROI (return on investment) on BI initiatives has proven to be poor data and information quality. Frequently, the quality of the data to be analysed or reported on is overlooked, or assumed to be adequate. These 'data surprises' are often discovered too late, leading to delays in the implementation of BI initiatives and budget over spend.
"Data is typically 'scrubbed' before it is loaded into a data warehouse environment, but as the drive toward real-time BI continues in the face of ever-increasing data volumes, it will become increasingly costly and difficult to address data quality problems simply via repetitive data cleansing," says Davies.
"What is needed is a strategic data quality programme where businesses formally and objectively assess and then address their organisational data and information management processes, leading to trustworthy data at source, and the elimination of ongoing institutionalised cleansing."
The breakfast briefing will demonstrate how businesses can best succeed through boosting their BI by combining world-class data quality and BI technology with best practice data quality management.
The event takes place over two days - on 16 April in Cape Town at The Radisson Hotel, Beach Road, Granger Bay and on 17 April in Johannesburg at The Saxon, 36 Saxon Road, Sandhurst. For more information on these and other forthcoming data management and information quality events, contact InfoBlueprint on +27 (0) 21 551 2410.
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Bryn Davies of InfoBlueprint has over 23 years of broad industry experience in IT and in particular data management. Subsequent to designing, building and managing one of the first data warehouses in SA, he spent 14 years with Sybase South Africa as Technical Director for the Cape Town operation. During this time, he was involved in all aspects of business intelligence, data management, enterprise application and data integration, and data and information quality. He was also product and solutions manager for leading data quality software solutions, and managed numerous consulting exercises at South African companies for data quality, data integration and BI. Subsequently, Davies co-founded InfoBlueprint and he is currently Managing Director of the company, which is dedicated to providing leading professional services in the fields of information management and data quality. He has authored a number of articles on the subject of data quality.
InfoBlueprint
InfoBlueprint is a specialist in data management and information quality solutions, helping organisations improve the quality of their business applications and decision-making towards greater business effectiveness and cost-efficiency by reducing the risks associated with poor, or unknown, data and information quality. It is also the first South African company solely dedicated to and specialising in data management and information quality. www.infoblueprint.co.za. Directors: Bryn Davies, Alan Snow and Shelley Brunette.
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