Back to Canberra DAMA
Agenda:
| Theme: | "Emerging Meta Data Standards" by Judith Newton from the USA |
| Where: | The Canberra Club |
When: |
Monday 13th July at 6:30pm Part of the presentation will be before entree and the remainder before dessert |
| Fee: | A fee of $25 will apply |
| RSVP: | Peter Davis ph. 6244 6955 |
Background: - We have asked Judith to tell us of her work on the ISO committee SC 32 (Data Management and Interchange Standards):
Although she may not be well known in Australia, she has been writing and speaking about data and metadata standardisation for many years. She has spoken at many DAMA Symposia and Chapter meetings around the U.S. She is employed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (part of the U.S. Department of Commerce - NISC) in the Information Technology Laboratory. She develops standards and provide guidance and expertise to the IT industry, both Government and private sectors. Part of her job involves: representing NISC on national and International level standards-making bodies; she was a founding member and first president of the National Capital Region DAMA Chapter; Together with other DAMA-NCR members, she produced the Manual for Data Administration published by NIST. You can find further details of her bio and curriculum vitae on her homepage:
http://www.sdct.itl.nist.gov/~newton/newton.htm
One of the implementations of the standard developed by SC 32 has been done by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. This is a Web-based implementation and can be visited at:
http://www.aihw.gov.au/nhik/index.html
Location: ABS, Cameron Offices, Chandler Street, Belconnen
Attendees:
Rob Smith-Roberts chaired the meeting in place of Des Walker who was unable to attend.
Peter Harwood introduced the topic. He distributed a questionnaire that listed various dimensions of an agency's attitude towards data management on the Internet. The scores or positions provided are based on the average result from 20 or so participants:
User...............*..Provider
(7.3) Participants generally saw themselves much more as "providers" of information on the Internet than "users".
Sparse...............*..Rich
(8.5) People at this session felt that the aim of their respective organisations was to support their internet/intranet facilities with "rich" (lots of descriptive information...) metadata.
Pull.........*.....Push
(6.2) The general goal of participants was slightly towards a "push" style strategy (rather than "pull") regarding metadata on the net.
Control.........*.........Facilitate I
(4.9) The tendency of the group towards either tightly "controlling" their net interactions or merely "facilitating" it was equally split.
Unbind..............*.....Bind
(7.4) The feeling of participants tended towards having their metadata "bound" in with their dam rather than held separately.
ISO...*...........Chat Room I
(3.2) When it came to how internet interaction should be mediated, the group was strongly in favour of a more formal approach rather than the free and open "chat room" style approach.
1 Fact ......*...........Replication
1 Place
(4.3) The group was generally in favour of holding one fact in one place but one or two participants were in favour of full replication which rather skewed the results. It is possible that not everyone understood the implications of this (or the ease with which the Net supports the "1 fact --- 1 place" principle via hyperlinks).
Additional dimensions were suggested, including:
Peter demonstrated some Centrelink data dictionary material via a browser. This had been created with just four days work, illustrating how quickly and easily metadata could be put on the Web.
During the ensuing discussion the following comments were made:
| 16th June | Next Meeting - DA Tools |
| 13th July | Judith Newton Dinner |
| 25th August | Data Quality Strategies |
| 23-34th Oct | National DAMA Conference |
| 8th December | DA - Core Business or not |
If members of other DAMA Chapters are in Canberra on the days of our meetings, we would like to extend our invitation for them to attend.
| In a pharmacy: | "We dispense with accuracy" |
| In a dance hall: | "Good clean dancing every night except Sunday" |
| In a petrol station: | "We will not sell petrol to anyone in a glass container" |
| In a restaurant: | "Anyone who considers that our waitresses are uncivil should see the manager" |
| In a military base: | "restricted to unauthorised personnel" |
| In an engineering shop: | "Our aim is to give our customers the lowest possible price and workmanship" |
| On a Hotel sign: | "Vegetarian fruit salad" |
Please feel free to contact any of the committee members, if you have questions about DAMA, the Canberra Chapter or any of its future events, or any suggestions on how we can improve the meetings, newsletters, contact, etc.
President: |
Des Walker |
0416 291033 |
Secretary: |
Michael Colledge |
02 62526812 |
Treasurer: |
Peter Bickerton |
02 62447151 |
Newsletter Ed: |
Rob Smith-Roberts |
0411 600656 |
http://www.dama.org.au/canberra.htm
Email now is info@canberra.dama.org.au
We still need more papers for the conference - there are a few departments that have been surprisingly quiet. Nothing yet from Defence, ABS, ATO, Immigration ....
We also have promises of a paper from a half a dozen or more people who are yet to supply an abstract. The deadline was 30th May but we can extend this just a little. We plan to have the Conference schedule finalised by mid June so please contact us ASAP if you want to submit a paper.
An extract from our media release:
International data administration consultant, Terry Moriarty, addressed seminars in Canberra and Melbourne and indicated that IT tool vendors were still not delivering products which address the basic problems of managing large and complex information resources. The seminar, sponsored jointly by the ACS and DAMA was entitled "Best Practice in Information Management" and the audience comprised data administrators from some of Australia's largest government and business IT installations.
Global changes in business thinking have moved large organisations strongly towards a "customer focus". This often results in a painful (but beneficial) integration exercise. Because of the great variety of customer types and relationships, Ms Moriarty urged data administrators to design their databases "for change". Her regular column in Database Programming and Design magazine has emphasised the importance to build the business rules that surround things like CUSTOMER into the actual database. To become what is termed a "teaming organisation", Ms Moriarty stated that it is imperative that the business rules are "active" within information systems.
Another one of the keys to successful information management is high quality meta-data (the data needed to manage the business' information resource). Large organisations typically have hundreds of programmers working on thousands of programs which update hundreds of files and tables and thousands of database columns. Also behind these operational systems are the emerging data warehouses. Meta-data assists in managing these and other kinds of resources. Many organisations, however, have not been able to achieve the level of quality needed by the business.
Ms Moriarty stated that the three factors crucial to success in this area are: the business will, the technology and the meta-data management infrastructure. Today the business has the will and the technology has advanced sufficiently to meet meta-dam requirements. We are still behind in terms of infrastructure. The challenge to the IT tool vendors is to deliver an integrated set of data administration tools which include: meta-data access tools, movement/replication tools, advanced modelling tools, change management tools. These tools must be compatible, via repository technologies, with our operational database and data warehousing tool suites.
Ms Moriarty believes the lead has been set by vendors such as Microsoft with it "opening up" its repository. We now need the mainframe repository vendors to follow suit, allowing third party tool providers to deliver the necessary infrastructure. This issue is expected to be one of the central topics at the DAMA National Conference which will be held in Canberra in October this year.
The seminar also included a brief session addressing the problem of mapping Object Oriented models into Data Models for database design. Ms Moriarty warned data administrators that they must learn enough about OO so that they can be effective "Object Administrators". If they cannot do this then they face the prospect of being displaced by the looming OO steamroller!
This was called "The High Cost of Low Quality Data"
Larry English is an entertaining speaker who drew on anecdotes and examples of poor quality data from a wide range of applications including banks, insurance companies and retailers. He presented various methodologies for addressing the problem. The basic message was to measure and assess existing data quality and outlined a variety of sampling methods and assessment systems. Fix the problems causing the errors, find resources to do the clean up, clean, fix, and monitor the progress.
He discussed ownership and stewardship of data but emphasised that data quality is an enterprise problem not just an IT problem.
While some of the material and concepts presented were not completely new he brought together many of the threads and presented them in a concise and compelling fashion.
His talk inspired us to create a "Data Quality - Cluster Report Card" which we had been considering, but hadn't really come to grips with. We expect this to be an integral part of our future data quality reporting regime. )
I thought he was presenting relevant stuff at just the right time for our organisation.
Peter Davis, Data Management, Centrelink
As the DAMA chapters in Australia have grown in size and hosted more professional member events, incurring costs and sometimes charging for them, we have realised that neither the committee nor the members have adequate legal, financial and taxation protection.
We have no legal entity for DAMA members, and committee members, in particular, could therefore be at risk of "common law" treatment. We could be held personally liable for debts, tax positions, liabilities and damages arising from the actions of DAMA. For example, to hire Old Parliament House from the Commonwealth Government for the 1998 DAMA Conference, we are required to be a legal entity and have indemnity insurance. DAMA International also requires this.
DAMA chapters throughout Australia have therefore been investigating the best way of becoming legally incorporated. Three options were identified:
The 2nd option has been recommended, and agreed in principle amongst the individual committees. The process is now well under way with a draft Memorandum of Association (our "constitution") being prepared currently. The detailed operating principles will be the next step. The one-off costs are expected to be about $5000 which includes professional help in setting the structure and drafting the documentation.
The idea of extending the current membership administration services that DAMA Melbourne engage VECCI (Victorian Employers Chamber of Commerce and Industry) to perform, to cover all of Australia was already being discussed. The incorporation issue makes this almost a prerequisite. The intention is that a set proportion of each subscription would be "retained" at the national level to fund this administration, and the remainder rebated to the state chapters to assist with providing professional membership services.
It is recommended that members will elect the state committees as currently, and the state committees will appoint the members of the "National Executive" (who constitute the legal office bearers of the company).
There are a number of issues that still need to be worked out, including:
If you have any comments, questions, opinions or suggestions, on these or any other incorporation issues, please contact any of the DAMA Committee or Richard Kevan, Vice-President, DAMA Melbourne, on (03) 9665 7601. Richard is the national coordinator for this exercise. If you would like to see either the recommendation report or the draft Memorandum of Association, Richard can send you a hard or soft copy.
More detail will follow, and of course the proposal will need to be ratified by the members (at the AGM or other appropriate forum) prior to officially commencing operation.
At this year's National Conference we plan to present an award - the annual DAMA Achievement Award. Details on how to nominate someone will be on the conference brochure.
We would like you to consider who you might nominate for this award based on the following criteria:
Please fill in the form and hand it in to Des or Rob at the next meeting.
Updating Contact Details
Dear Member,
Please help update our database by completing the following information and return it to the Secretary, DAMA Canberra, as soon as possible. Please note that we are especially interested in updating our email address information.
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PO Box 1230
Tuggeranong ACT 2901
Fax: 02 6291 1412
Email: info@canberra.dama.org.au