Is Zombie Data Taking Over?
It is easy to get ahead of ourselves with all the innovation happening with data and analytics. I wouldn’t call it hype, as that would imply no value or competency has been achieved. But I would say that what is bright, shiny, and new is always more interesting than the ordinary.
And, to be frank, there is still a lot of ordinary in our data management world.
In fact, over the past couple of weeks, discussions with companies have uncommonly focused on the ordinary. This in some ways appeared to be unusual because questions focused on the basic foundational aspects of data management and governance — and for companies that I have seen talk publicly about their data management successes.
“Where do I clean the data?”
“How do I get the business to invest in data?”
“How do I get a single customer view of my customer for marketing?”
What this tells me is that companies are under siege by zombie data.
Data is living in our business under outdated data policies and rules. Data processes and systems are persisting single-purpose data. As data pros turn over application rocks and navigate through the database bogs to centralize data for analytics and virtualize views for new data capabilities, zombie data is lurching out to consume more of the environment, blocking other potential insight to keep the status quo.
The questions you and your data professional cohorts are asking, as illustrated above, are anything but basic. The fact that these foundational building blocks have to be assessed once again demonstrates that organizations are on a path to crush the zombie data siege, democratize data and insight, and advance the business.
Keep asking basic questions — if you aren’t, zombie data will eventually take over, and you and your organization will become part of the walking dead.
To defend your business from zombie data, read:
