Diseases are named either after the doctor who discovers the disease (Alzheimer’s, Crohn’s) or after the unfortunate patient on whom the disease or disorder is diagnosed (there is an Eastern European curse, “May you have a disease named after you.”). Baron von Munchausen was unfortunate enough to have given his name to a debilitating disorder. His disorder was psychological. He believed he had a variety of diseases and in fact displayed the symptoms of those diseases but with no underlying illness. His legacy is the Munchausen Syndrome.

Many organizations are examining the concepts of data governance and planning to implement a data governance program. Some organizations are concerned that a formal enterprise data governance program will take many months to implement and may not deliver tangible business value quickly enough to satisfy leadership. Other organizations may be troubled by the problems reported with large governance programs and would like to implement a more tactically focused data governance process. A new approach that addresses both these sets of concerns could be called “Iterative Data Governance”.

Are you looking at purchasing or selecting a data warehouse related toolset – BI, ETL, Data Profiling, etc…? Organizations often burn lots of time and energy trying to figure out what tools, software, and hardware they want to run their data warehouse and analytics on. Most of the various tools and components can be quite expensive to build and support, so I can understand the concern that they feel for making sure they spend their money wisely.