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Melinda Hodkiewicz's avatar

Hi Joe, your example of the home building is very reminiscent of the example of a data town plan at the heart of John Giles' new book "The Data Elephant in the Board Room - driving data integration from the enterprise-side Data Town Plan". If you haven't read it then you might want to have a look. https://technicspub.com/data-elephant/

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Joe Reis's avatar

You should look at who wrote the forward for that book :)

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Melinda Hodkiewicz's avatar

Thanks, noted. Also I provided one of the recommendations!

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Maury's avatar

Had your Freestyle Friday on my mind... For building the a house scenario, why not a citizen architect, citizen electrician, citizen plumber? Home Depot is around the block! In IT, seems certain foundational skills are respected. A wizard at building great BI reports does not translate into a data creator. With less specialization, less data modelers/data architects, data engineers, taking up role of data modeling, they become a jack of all trades, master of none - and Tasks/Sprints take longer. Building analogy, what we lack is intentional frameworks and inspections (Arch review, QA). Dread them when the county/city has to inspect your house addition/deck etc. Standards, building codes - lead to better quality, less defects... Good models lead to data quality, foundationally.

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Joe Reis's avatar

How many times have you been to Home Depot to try to fix something, only to call in a expert for hard jobs? I can do basic plumbing, but that doesn't make me qualified to install a sewer main.

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Joe Reis's avatar

spot on! I love this.

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Ben Doremus's avatar

Preach! And the analogy to home building is great; I can use that in my own communication to tech and non-tech audiences, and people will get it and respect the process.

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