Dell has today announced the recall of more than 4 million laptop batteries over fears that they could overheat and start a fire.

Did you know that I’m the secretary of the IAIDQ’s UK community of practise? No, I thought not – and you probably don’t know what the IAIDQ is either, eh?

To measure the quality of any data item we need to understand its definition. Without that, we might totally misunderstand what we’re looking at and if we’re using the information as the basis for making an important decision the consequences can be dire.

It was Fathers Day recently in the UK and my wonderful daughter presented me with a lovely gift of a personalised handkerchief. Can you spot the deliberate mistake? I’m sure she did it intentionally because of my nose for detail!

I sometimes wonder if there’s substance behind the new catchphrases that the IT industry loves to throw about. Take CDI, or Customer Data Integration, for example; is this some new, bright, shiny technology? Or is it the cynical re-branding of something we already thought we had?

In my blog entry on 28th March, I discussed the issues surrounding the migration of patient data at the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre. This is part of a national programme to bring together patient data from different NHS Trusts to provide a “single patient view”.

BBC New 24’s coverage of the recent court case between the Beatles’ record label, Apple Corps Ltd. and the computer firm, Apple Computer, Inc. was as comprehensive and professional as usual – until they suffered a case of mistaken identify!

It’s more than a month since I last posted anything; thank you Simon, Ian and KJG for your e-mails enquiring about my health and whereabouts. I’m pleased to say that I am well – I’ve just been extremely busy with the release of Datanomic’s new product dn:Director (more on that in my next post).

Why do so many organisations turn a blind-eye to data quality? One thing for sure is that the legacy data quality software providers have done little to help address this crucial business issue by delivering products that require years of expertise to successfully leverage all of the functionality available (and, just as importantly, to know when to use something else instead). After a dozen years of working in the field, and having built a highly profitable consultancy business to help clients address this short-fall, I decided a year or so ago to join Datanomic. I’m delighted to say that, last month, we celebrated the launch of dn:Director, a data quality product that is setting new standards for data quality management in the 21st Century.

Because I choose to live near Oxford, whilst Datanomic is based in Cambridge, I frequently drive between the two cities in the wee small hours. So it came to be that I was doing some grocery shopping in a Tesco store at 1am one day recently when I noticed a kerfuffle at the checkout.