Last November, I presented in London at the Data Management and Information Quality Europe 2012 conference. My presentation was called Do you know what’s in the data you’re consuming.
In the presentation, I compare the data supply chain with the food supply chain.
I believe that data consumers have the right to be provided with facts about the content of the data they are consuming, just as food consumers are provided with facts about the food they are buying. The presentation provides guidelines on how you can improve your data supply chain.
Little did I realise in November that within 3 months the term “provenance” would be hitting the headlines as the European horsemeat scandal grows.
There’s a silver lining in this food scandal for data quality management professionals. As financial regulators increasingly demand evidence of the provenance of the data provided to them, it is now easier for data quality management professionals to explain to their business colleagues and senior management what “data provenance” means, and what it requires. Retailers, such as Tesco, must have controls in their supply chain that ensure that the food they sell to consumers only contains “what it says on the tin”. Similarly, financial services organisations providing data to financial regulators must have controls in their data supply chain that ensure the quality of the data they provide can be trusted. Regulators are now asking financial services organisations to demonstrate evidence that their data supply chain can be trusted. They require organisations to demonstrate evidence of their data provenance, as applied to their critical or material data.
But what exactly is “data provenance”? The best definition I have seen comes from Michael Brackett in his excellent book “Data Resource Simplexity“.
“Data Provenance is provenance applied to the organisation’s data resource. The data provenance principle states that the source of data, how the data were captured, the meaning of the data when they were first captured, where the data were stored, the path of those data to the current location, how the data were moved along that path, and how those data were altered along that path must be documented to ensure the authenticity of those data and their appropriateness for supporting the business”.
Enjoy your “beef” burger!
