The Data Mountain has no top...

http://www.ndbteam.com/SAIR_docs/SAIR_NDB_V2.9.pdfLike the pursuit of riches or fame, the data mountain has no top .... 

Sir Ranulph Fiennes, an explorer,  became at the age of 67 the oldest British person to climb Mount Everest. He was successful in 2009 at his third attempt, despite suffering a heart attack and other health problems on his two previous attempts. When interviewed he attributed his success during this latest effort to two things:

• Applying the lessons learned  from previous attempts
• Telling himself as he walked to ‘imagine it is a mountain with no top’  
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The benefits of applying lessons learned mean that planning can be improved, the best team assembled and during execution, more experience can be applied to making the correct course adjustments along the way.

The benefits of repeating the mantra – ‘the mountain has no top’ - is not so clear. The phrase seems defeatist, seeming to make the task insurmountable. Sir Ranulph explained his thinking thus: "Forget about thinking that you are going to succeed. You have to just keep plodding. Imagine it is a mountain with no top." How can we learn from Sir Ranulph’s experiences on the ‘real’ mountain to the task we are faced with the conquering the data mountain?  

NDB are hosting a half day workshop as part of the SMI 2010 E&P Information & Data Management conference and will explore the lessons from our own data mountain experiences.

Many attending the conference have experience of both successful and less successful initiatives in data management. Each experience tells us something about what works and what works for each unique organisation. By realistic recognition that the data mountain may never be conquered we must ensure that each initiative or project gets us somewhere along the way – even if it feels like a ‘plodding’ step.

Working with NDB’s experienced sherpas and sharing the experience from your fellow explorers  we will together produce a report from the workshop which will look at the relative ‘benefit’ values of:

• Data standards
• Data service architecture
• Data ownership
• Data admin
• Data management  technology
• User behaviour

In planning our ascent we will learn lessons and  capture our thoughts:

1. What should always happen?
2. What should you always avoid ?
3. What are the biggest challenges – technology, user behaviour or organisational change?
4.  ...  and the often surprising answer to what are the concrete benefits?

 We will take our inspiration from Sir Ranulph and plan our ascent on the mountain-with-no-top without the aid of oxygen tanks.  I hope you will join us on our expedition. Register here.

A little word about....The SAIR subscription Project. We are under way with this industry first knowledge base on how well subsurface applications work together. Find out more here