Big Data and Good Data and Enterprise Architecture

As consultant Tom Davenport said, “At American Airlines, they told me they had 11 different usages of the term ‘airport’. As a frequent traveler on their planes, I was initially a bit concerned about this but when they explained it, the proliferation of meanings made sense. They said the cargo people view any place you can pick up or drop off cargo as an airport. The maintenance people viewed any place that you can fix an airplane as an airport. The people who work with Air Transportation Authorities relied on a list of international airports.” This scared me. If we try to take these disparate databases that have different definitions of the word airport, what are we going to get? I know I want to make sure that the pilot flying the airplane knows which word is being used in what context. But, I ask, how do you have the unique meanings when you essentially have a running database? Good Data comes before Big Data - we will explore how to get there. It requires Enterprise Architecture.