TeamData Office Hours Report

Last week’s office hours features an all Canadian and all female attendance for the first half of the meeting. It was quite the treat for me. Not because we were all women, but because we have had mostly non-female attendees since the reboot. Good on ya, ladies.

What is the Status of Enterprise Data Architecture?

This question proposed by an attendee was one I’ve been wondering about myself. I’ve not been working on large, enterprise projects for the last few years, so I’m not sure what the status us. I’m certainly seeing fewer requests for data modeling support (I’ve received only one in the last year). I’ve not had recruiters contacting me for help finding candidates.

I know that Data Governance initiatives have raised the need for having data architects and I’ve had a few discussions with companies about trying to fill those needs.

My recommendations for those looking for data modeling/data architecture work is to brush up on your data governance skills, or if you have them, making sure they are included in your resume.

What About Enterprise Data Modeling? How Has it Changed?

Certainly there are few projects where software applications and custom databases are being built. Serverless applications, commercial off the shelf and government off the shelf implementations have grown.

But that’s not the only reason I build data models. All those implementations still have data requirements. All have configurations and customizations that organizations need to understand.

The other areas where I’ve seen a good deal of data modeling is on integration projects, where a canonical data model is required to publish data to and consume data from. In fact, this is a great place to leverage industry standard data models.

Data News

We also talked about a couple of data profession items in the news.

This story, about a data manager for the state of Florida who alleges she was terminated/reassigned because she was asked to adjust data in a way she believed, was harmful to the public.

And then there was this confusing bar chart issued by the state of Georgia with misleading/awkward (depending on what you think happened) on the trends in Covid19 data.