Book Reviews

The Data Asset: How Smart Companies Govern Their Data for Business Success
978-0-470-46226-3



"If we accept that the key assets of today's organizations lie in data, information and human intellectual capital, then we must also recognize that harnessing these assets requires a relentless focus on data quality and data governance. I simply don't see another reasonable alternative for a business looking to exploit this latent value. Tony Fisher's book manages to put forward this case in a compelling way without the usual vendor recourse to technology for the sake of technology."

Ian Charlesworth
Practice Leader
Ovum Software


"Especially for businesses with day-to-day massively complex marketing, risk and channel decisioning, until data quality is understood as having the potential to be the deciding factor in whether a business succeeds or fails against its competition, it will always be seen as a support function. The Data Asset positions data quality as being that deciding factor. It has taken data quality beyond an IT function to the C-level, which unless this is done, it never seems to get accomplished."

Peter Harvey
President
Intellidyn


"The phrase 'data as a corporate asset' has been adopted by business and IT professionals alike. Finally, there's a book that deconstructs the phrase and gets to the meat of what matters: information as a business enabler. Tony's book not only justifies a newfound investment in data, it explains why the time for formal and sustained information management has come. And not a moment too soon."

Jill Dyché and Evan Levy
co-founders of Baseline Consulting and authors of Customer Data Integration: Reaching a Single Version of the Truth (Wiley)


"In this book, Tony Fisher has provided an articulate presentation of the wide range of business impacts attributable to the absence of organizational data quality management, and then provides a practical guide for baselining and improving enterprise data governance. Tony's years of experience in helping organizations have infused this text with many valuable recommendations that will lead to continual organizational maturation and improvement in the value of the enterprise data asset."

David Loshin
President of Knowledge Integrity, Inc., and author of Master Data Management and Enterprise Knowledge Management: The Data Quality Approach