Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Three new CDMP holders!

Three more people successfully completed exams at the 2008 DAMA Conference to attain the CDMP designation. In addition, 24 people took the Information and Data Quality Beta exam. This was a great turnout and we would like to thank all who took the beta. We received a lot of good feedback that will help to improve the exam. The beta will also be given at the IDQ Conference at MIT this summer, and is available for chapters interested in giving the beta for free at chapter meetings.

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 DAMA-DMBOK framework is starting to develop a life of its own. There were two sessions on Wednesday related to how the DMBOK is being used. The first, by Glenn J. Thomas, was "Application of the DMBOK in an Enterprise Data Architecture." Glenn (pictured here) gave a very entertaining presentation about how the Commonwealth Office of Technology for the State of Kentucky is using the DMBOK as a framework for promoting an enterprise data strategy.

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

Peter Aiken gave an introduction about what a mashup is by playing "Bootylicious Smells Like Teen Spirit," a well known example of music mashup of Destiny Child's "Bootylicious" and Nirvana's "Smells like Teen Spirit."

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

In his presentation on "Data Modeling and XML: Two Ways to Structure Data," David Hay proposed that the ER model represents the semantics of an organization whereas XML is an implementation language for moving data. Unfortunately some who are promoting XML don't recognize the difference and skip the semantic modeling step altogether. Just because you have tags doesn't mean that you agree on the meaning of the data.

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 i
n 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

The DAMA conference would not be the same without the annual Homemade Jam session. DM musicians entertained a crowd on Monday night. The line-up included improvisational blues to sing-along favorites such as "Brown Sugar" and Pat Benatar's "Hit me with Your Best Shot."

Winners of 2008 DAMA-I Awards

DAMA President John Schley presented the 2008 DAMA-I awards at the DAMA Members meeting on Monday evening.

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?

A little bit of blarney from the DataFlux sponsored party on St. Patty's day Monday. There was food, music and social time for all. Some even had a Wii bit of fun with virtual bowling and baseball.

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

Anyone can join and load pictures into the photo pool or discuss experiences at the DAMA 2008 Symposium group. See images from the conference here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/dama2008/

The Chapter Challenge

At the President's Council meeting on Sunday, Eva announced that Seattle now has 8 CDMP holders, and she issued a challenge to all other DAMA chapters to beat this number in 2008.

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

Exams will be proctored at the San Diego Conference from 5:00 to 6:30 pm on Tuesday, March 18th and from 4:30 to 6:00 pm on Wednesday, March 19th in the Marina 4 conference room. No reservations are necessary, just show up during these times. The exams take 90 minutes each to complete.

Data and Information Quality Exam Beta Released

The new Data and Information Quality Exam is available for beta testing at the San Diego DAMA Symposium. That means it is being offered for FREE to anyone who wants to take it during the conference. It will also be available at the summer MIT Information Quality conference and for DAMA chapters who want to proctor it through July.

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

Pat Cupoli gave the annual ICCP status report to the DAMA Board and the Chapter President's Council. Some interesting statistics from the report:

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!

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