Last week I had the opportunity to lead a panel discussion about data clean up at the quarterly NetForum Users Group meeting. (Quick plug: If you're not a member of your AMS users group, join now! And if there isn't a users group, start one!)

At the end of the session, I asked the participants to offer some final words of advice. I was coalescing thoughts of my own and arrived at these two suggestions about doing data clean up:

1. Just start.
2. It's never done.

Both are simple, but oh so hard.

If you're not already cleaning your data in some manner, today is the day to start. And don't try to do it all; just pick one thing and clean.

And always remember: data cleaning is never done. Data that isn't actively managed will become stale over time. So either you're cleaning it, or it's getting worse.

So what are you waiting for?