Wes’s Wednesday Wisdom

Be concise! I started a monthly newsletter almost 25 years ago (which I recently discontinued). And almost six years ago I started writing these “Wednesday Wisdom” missives. I’ve received more compliments about my Wednesday Wisdom in six years than I have for my monthly newsletter in nearly 25 years ago. Why? Because these missives are […]

A great example of a data integrity report! A couple months back I discussed the importance of data integrity reports. One of my past clients and a longtime reader, David Churchill at Grantmakers in Health, offered up this idea, which I think is fantastic and should be added to any association’s list of data integrity reports.

“If you keep doin’ what you’re doin’, you’ll keep gettin’ what you’re gettin’.” I saw this line recently (“If you keep doin’ what you’re doin’, you’ll keep gettin’ what you’re gettin’.”) and I chuckled because of how often I experience this with my clients. I’ll hear things from my clients like “Our data is really

Rather than adding something new, try subtracting I read recently that sociological research suggests, when presented with a problem, humans default to “adding” something to address the problem, rather than subtracting. And of course, this got me to thinking about how this happens in data management all the time. Some examples: When faced with a particular challenge for collecting

It’s always people, process, and technology I speak and write a lot about people, process, and technology (Here’s a whole bunch on that.) In a nutshell, your highest performance will come when the right people are using the right technology in the right way (process). So whenever there is a data management challenge, we need to

Once it’s lost, trust can be difficult to regain I recall hearing once long ago that trust is like a bank account with one distinct difference. If you think of telling the truth as one unit of savings, a lie counts as four units of spending. Put another way, every time you “lie” you have to

Share your successes! I was speaking at an association meeting recently and one of the points I raised was that associations should practice what I call database PR or database public relations. In a nutshell, database PR is about proactively and regularly telling our users all the good work that is occurring in the database. (Here’s more on database PR.) We need

What are YOUR data integrity reports? Sitting in an AMS demo with a client recently, I was pleasantly surprised to see the AMS vendor had a short list of reports they called “Data cleaning” reports. These reports included a check for potential duplicate records, checking for erroneous emails, and checking for other missing data (e.g.,

You might have to do SOME of the work yourself! Many, many years ago I met with an executive director of a small association to discuss their needs for a new association management system. In the course of the conversation we determined that one thing she’d like to be able to do is capture key points

Don’t manage to the exception! One of the universal truths about data management is, wherever possible, avoid managing to the exception. What I mean by this is to avoid developing any process that is designed to catch some arcane or unusual circumstance. Instead, the process should capture what happens the vast majority of the time, and