As I was cleaning out my file drawers the other day, I came across an old DM Review article on Data Warehousing Security written by Kenneth Allard and Ramon Barquin. Those of you in the healthcare industry will recognize Ken and Ramon’s lead-in story as a type of breach of patient privacy and confidentiality, which led to the stringent HIPAA regulation.

A data strategy is a data management strategy – choices we make about how to manage data assets.

Acquiring funding for analytic efforts is a significant challenge that most organizations face at one time or another, often year after year. Companies of all sizes, projects small and large, all have to be able to justify a reason for their effort and a reason for any funds required for the successful development and deployment of the end solution.

Many organizations take a shortcut (they think) on the time required for modeling by skipping the vital step of developing a Conceptual Data Model (CDM). Conceptual Data Models describe the business and should be developed before attempting to develop any kind of solution model, be that for a Data Warehouse, OLTP, MDM, or any other application.