Data, Drills and Defense

How Policies,?Standards enforced over 100 years ago should be the way all enterprises need to learn from and incorporate into all that is DATA

The story of the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904 is important for a few reasons.?One great reason is lack of standards.?When firefighters from neighboring cities arrived, they couldn't hook up their hoses?because in 1904?there were over 600 variations of hose couplings?on hydrants in the United States.?To this day, it is one of the largest urban conflagrations in US history.?And in today’s money,?the toll of this one event is upwards of three billion dollars.?But the Great Fire is remarkable not just for its tolls?but for what happened afterwards.

America began using data to make buildings safer?and to improve the way we respond to fires.?Governments passed ordinances?that became the basis of the first building codes:?standards that inform the design and construction of buildings?to make them more resistant to fire?and to protect the people that occupy them.?Created national standards for fire fighting equipment?so that crews coming out of state could hook up their hoses.

Data, drills and defense.?The collective impact of changes implemented in the US since 1904?has meant that the country no longer have the same number of great urban fires?that were so frequent in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Fast forward to 2021 and take the COVID data in perspective. Still today states report testing data, vaccine data, COVID demographic data?differently.?Having nonstandard data, unstandardized data,?in the midst of a pandemic?is like not being able to hook up your hoses to the hydrants?when your country is burning down.?

Enterprises must employ a family of standards that include not only commonly recognized approaches for the management and utilization of data assets, but also proven and successful methods for representing and sharing data. Enterprises must implement IT solutions that provide an opportunity to fully automate the information management lifecycle, properly secure data, and maintain end-to-end data management. Given the diversity of systems, these standards should be applied at the earliest practical point in the data lifecycle and industry standards for an open data architecture should be used wherever practical.

Standards are not an end unto themselves, but rather, they provide value when enabling data and information to be readily and securely utilized and exchanged.

Inspired from: