First, for those of you who missed the recent webinar a podcast is now available at http://www.datamigrationpro.com/?page=podcasts

Now onto the business of the socialisation of knowledge. When we are working on large-scale migrations it goes without saying that no one person will have all the knowledge we need. As problems come up we will have to consult across the business. I came across a great example of this the other day. One of my clients is in the early stages of a migration, so we are focusing on doing our stage one data quality work. A really typical question has come up around the correct values for a particular field. It should be of the form Annnnnn (one alpha followed by six numbers). And most of the data set follows that except of course for a couple of score records that have AAnnnnn. So why is that? Well the business domain experts between them are sorting it out, the billing guy and the customer accounts guy and engineering expert. Listening to them get to grips with the issues is fascinating. Ideas float around between them. Half-formed sentences started by one person are completed by another. All very normal really. It's obvious that the process of discovery and creation of knowledge involves all sorts of shared experiences and insights, a collective approach to understanding.

And this is what I mean by the socialisation of knowledge. In a complex environment there is more knowledge almost floating in air the between people than there is if I were to take each individual aside and take a complete brain dump (if such a thing were possible) then try to blend it all together.

Well an understanding of this helps us mitigate risk because there is a greater knowledge of data issues out there in the business than maybe we appreciate if we don't set up our projects to create the opportunities for these understandings to emerge. We know that we are (probably) not going to have enough time or budget to completely analyse all our data sources, so we need to use the socialised knowledge in our businesses to direct us to the areas of greatest threat. We also need that knowledge to solve those problems as they emerge. I sometimes think large organisations are something like idiot savants - at one and the same time brilliantly clever and scarily dumb. Hence the role of the Data Quality Rules meetings. Use them not just instrumentally to solve the issues in front of you but also to build the team that jointly will have uncover all the knowledge hidden in the organisation.

Johny Morris

(jmorris@iergo.co.uk)