First, Do No Harm:  Commentary from Gwen Thomas
The Irony of Sarbanes-Oxley
The irony of Sarbanes-Oxley is that what the SEC now demands is what good executives have been asking for all along. Every good leader wants to know what their true numbers are and how their management team knows those numbers are accurate.
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Data, Dams. and the Mighty Mississippi
When I work with groups who express feelings of hopelessness regarding their data, I try to help them reframe the problem. Here's one way.

Pretend, I say, that your data is a river flowing through the organization. You have a lot of data. You have production systems feeding water - data - into your enterpise. Day after day, more and more water feeds the river. It starts out in many little trickles. It comes together to form streams, and eventually it becomes a powerful river.

Now picture trash floating in your river. What do you do? more

Taxonomy Whitepapers

Best Practices for Assembling Aligned Taxonomies

A Taxonomy Framework

A Taxonomy Roadmap

Using Metadata And Taxonomies To Enable Enterprise Integration

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Gwen Thomas serves as Editor for SOX-online, the Vendor-Neutral Sarbanes-Oxley Site. In addition, she provides Data Governance and Sarbanes-Oxley consulting through her own company as well as through CIBER, Inc., a leading systems integrator.

A frequent speaker at industry conferences, she is known for helping IT and Business leaders demystify complex information problems while applying governance and standard, repeatable solutions. Write to her at [email protected].
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