#301 Learnings From 25+ Years in Data Quality - Interview w/ Olga Maydanchik

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Transcript for this episode (link) provided by Starburst. You can download their Data Products for Dummies e-book (info-gated) here and their Data Mesh for Dummies e-book (info gated) here.

Olga's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/olga-maydanchik-23b3508/

Walter Shewhart - Father of Statistical Quality Control: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_A._Shewhart

William Edwards Deming - Father of Quality Improvement/Control: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

Larry English - Information Quality Pioneer: https://www.cdomagazine.tech/opinion-analysis/article_da6de4b6-7127-11eb-970e-6bb1aee7a52f.html

Tom Redman - 'The Data Doc': https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomredman/

In this episode, Scott interviewed Olga Maydanchik, an Information Management Practitioner, Educator, and Evangelist.

Some key takeaways/thoughts from Olga's point of view:

1. Learn your data quality history. There are people who have been fighting this good fight for 25+ years. Even for over a century if you look at statistical quality control. Don't needlessly reinvent some of it :)
2. Data literacy is a very important aspect of data quality. If people don't understand the costs of bad quality, they are far less likely to care about quality.
3. Data quality can be a tricky topic - if you let consumers know that the data quality isn't perfect, they can lose trust. But A) in general, that conversation is getting better/easier to have and B) we _have_ to be able to identify quality as a problem in order to fix it.
4. Data quality is NOT a project - it's a continuous process.
5. Even now, people are finding it hard to use the well-established data quality dimensions. It's a framework for considering/measuring/understanding data quality so it’s not very helpful to data...