Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Three new CDMP holders!
Please contact the ICCP office at office@iccp.org or by phone at (847)299-4227 or (800-843-8227) "800-U-GET-CCP" if you would like to have the Information and Data Quality beta exam proctored at your chapter.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Zachman Enterprise Architecture - Next Exam in Development
John Zachman announced his latest iteration of the Zachman Framework at the DAMA Symposium, the "Zachman Framework2." Along with the changes to the Framework, the ICCP is working on a new CDMP exam focused on the Zachman Enterprise Architecture. An exam outline has been developed and reviewed by John and by Stan Locke, with a proposed time frame for completion by the end of 2008.
(Pat Cupoli and Eva Smith, DAMA/ICCP Directors, with John Zachman at the 2008 DAMA Symposium in San Diego.)
How Far Can You Go?
Do you have goals? I bet they don't stack up to Conference Keynote Speaker and long distance swimmer, Lynne Cox's! Or perhaps you never thought of swimming the English Channel, or the icy waters of Antarctica. After Lynne's inspirational account of her long distance swimming adventures, I had a new appreciation for what it means to set your mind to something and achieve it.
When she was fifteen years old, Lynne swam the English channel and set a record, then she beat the record again a few years later. In 1987, she had to wade through a myriad of politics to make a goodwill swim to the Soviet Union, and if that wasn't enough for one lifetime, she was the first person to swim over a mile in the icy waters of Antarctica (without a wetsuit!). Burrrrr! That definitely pushes the limits of what our human physiology is designed to handle. A Discovery Channel video was shown of her swimming to Antarctica. Her message is that sometimes weird ideas can work out really well and if you put your mind to something, you can make big things happen. With big ideas and a great team you can achieve anything. When someone from the audience asked if she had other passions besides swimming, writing and speaking she quickly quipped "yes, Data Management," bringing a roar of laughter and applause from the audience.
I had an unexpected opportunity to meet Lynne later in the day (and wow, I even got someone to take a picture!). I was curious about how long it takes for her body to recover from the cold after a swim in icy waters. She said it can take 3 or 4 days, and her swimming accomplishments have contributed to scientific knowledge about how the human body recovers from cold. Her warm and genuine speaking style and amazing stories were inspirational. They illustrate how much humans can accomplish with smart and focused determination. I'm ready to go get her book!
DAMA-DMBOK in Practice
The second presentation was on "Applying the DMBOK to Assess and Align Public Health Surveillance" was given by Donna D. Medeiros of RTI International. This was a different approach, in which the DMBOK is being used as a framework for assessing the data management practices of pharmaceutical studies and healthcare organizations. Donna also actively promoted the CDMP in her talk. She said that her manager required that she become certified, which motivated her to complete the exams within 4 months. In discussions after the presentations, both speakers are avid supporters of the CDMP in their organizations.
Data Mashup Panel
Web mashups combine data from multiple sources into a single visual representation. Why is this important to data professionals? Peter pointed out that if we aren't paying attention, this trend could become like XML, where programmers embrace its capabilities, with little regard for the data implications.
Mashups allow programmers to bring data together from various sources into a single service. Someone asked how this relates to Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), and one of the panel members responded that it can be published as a data service. Peter added that this is still evolving.
Dean Allemang talked about using RDFA to build Semantic Mashups. In the early days of the web, there were no links to maps, then came mapquest that could map all. Now you can see all kinds of data on a map, like houses on Craigs list. However, this example has only one data source. On the other hand, an example like Piggybank, a Firefox extension, allows the Firefox browser to be a mashup platform, pulling data from multiple sources to be displayed in a single view. The RDF metadata model provides the ultimate mashup language.
Data Modeling & XML
Showing a graphic representation of an XML schema side by side illustrated the value of the data model for visually analyzing the correctness of relationships. David pointed out that in modeling it is more important to be clear than correct.
Another consideration is that XML is fundamentally hierarchical, and non-hierarchical relationships are not easily represented in XML. As a result, a data model can be derived from the XML schema, but the hierarchical structure limits its use for storing, retrieving and validating data. Although there is some data type and format structure imposed for validation, with XML Schema, there is an assumption that the data is already semantically valid.
David's recommendation is to use data modeling first to understand the problem and meaning of the data, then determine how it will be converted to XML for data transport. He emphasized that XML is a technological design tool, not a data structure design tool.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Homemade Jam Session
Winners of 2008 DAMA-I Awards
Here were this year's winners:
Award | Candidate Name | Bio | Title |
Academic | John Talburt, Ph.D. University of Arkansas at Little Rock | Began the MS and PhD in Information Quality programs, has worked for many years to promote the teaching of information and data quality in traditional MIS courses and programs | Professor, Information Science – University of Arkansas at Little Rock |
Professional | David Marco | Founded EWSolutions in 1997, leading expert in meta data management, lecturer and author of 2 books on meta data management | President and Founder, EWSolutions, Inc. |
Government | Suzanne Acar | Senior Information Architect and Co-chair, Federal Data Architecture Subcommittee (DAS) Office of the Secretary (OCIO) U.S. Department of the Interior | Senior Information Architect U.S. Department of the Interior |
Community | N. Michael Scofield | A tireless and highly effective campaigner for improved data quality and data management practices, as an employee, consultant, author, and presenter. 20+ year member of Los Angeles chapter of DAMA – held most positions on the chapter board over the years | Manager, Data Asset Development – ESRI, Inc. |
Would you trust this guy with your data?
New Career Center on DAMA.org
David Rafner of the DAMA International Board provided this announcement:
DAMA-I has just updated its web content management system. They are still tuning up the content and appearance but have added a very nice feature that they hope you will appreciate – a full-featured career center.
The new career center offers both employers and prospective employees enhancements that is expected will significantly increase the popularity of this site to anyone in data management related fields. Because the career center draws from a pool of hundreds of thousands of jobs, professionals in areas such as data modeling, data architecture, enterprise architecture, BI, etc., will be able to quickly find jobs in these categories. Check it out: http://www.jobtarget.com/home/index.cfm?site_id=2741
Monday, March 17, 2008
Anne Marie in Action
Anne Marie Smith was one of the first to kick off the 2008 conference on Sunday afternoon with her workshop on Developing Robust Business Requirements. In her usual lively style, she engaged the group in discussion and used fun stories from her family to illustrate key points. At one point she asked people to share their job titles. There were all kinds of titles, from IT specialist to data architect. Then she asked how many in the room saw their role as being primarily a business or data analyst, even if their title did not reflect that. The majority of participants raised hands. Interesting. She noted that we're a profession that is supposed to be semantically precise, but we don't even know what to call ourselves!
Flickr Group for DAMA 2008 Symposium
The Chapter Challenge
You can send an email with your CDMP numbers (and pictures of holders if you like!) to in4mationjunkie@gmail.com and your chapter will be highlighted in this blog.
CDMP Exams at the DAMA Conference
Data and Information Quality Exam Beta Released
Typically new exams go through a beta period to get feedback and statistics on the questions before it goes into full productions. Anyone who passes the beta exam may apply it toward the CDMP requirements by paying the exam fee later. It's a "try before you buy" opportunity for those who are willing to test the exam and provide feedback.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Status Report To DAMA Board
Total Certified Business Intelligence Professional (CBIP) Exams taken in 2007 was 946, up 62% from 2007. The total Certified Data Management Professional (CDMP) exams taken in 2007 was 946, up 86% since 2007. These two certifications have been available since 2004. There was a total of 319 new data certifications issued in 2007, which brings the total of certified data professionals to 761 since 2004.
There was a lot of activity in 2007!
Saturday, March 15, 2008
DAMA Data Dictionary Now Available!
Friday, March 14, 2008
Blogging from the 2008 DAMA Symposium in San Diego
The Data Management Symposium in San Diego kicks off on Sunday, March 16. The ICCP will be proctoring CDMP exams at the conference and Pat will be presenting a session on certification. This year, special ribbons will be available for CDMP holders to proudly display on their badges. For those who can't attend, I'll be blogging here with breaking news and observations from the conference, so stay tuned!
Eva Smith, ICCP Director, DAMA International