International data quality firm Pilog has launched its Pilog Academy, in Cape Town, which will serve as a hub where industry- derived best practice and academic developments will be used for tertiary data quality courses, says Pilog Group CEO Dr Salomon de Jager.
The use of industry examples and practical work in operational environments with theore- tical training will help to train the students who will be doing these jobs tomorrow, he explains.
“Industry has the experience of implementing international data quality standards and practices, and the divide between academic education and industry needs has not yet been bridged.”
Using Pilog’s international presence and work as an example, De Jager says the firm has decades of experience in applying master data and data quality principles in defence, government and nuclear, as well as in power station, railway and industry systems.
Integrating this experience, references and the solutions developed into the academic work being done worldwide is the key objective of the Pilog Academy.
The academy aims to draw on and share academic content with data quality academics, including Universidad de Castilla-la Mancha department of technology and information systems professor Dr Ismael Caballero Muñoz-Reja, University of Arkansas Little Rock (UALR) department of information science academic Professor John Talburt, Myongji University department of industrial and management engineering academic Professor Sunho Kim, Hochschule Neu-Ulm department of information management dean Professor Dr Olaf Jacob, Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) department of information technology department head Professor Bennett Alexander and University of Adelaide information technology and mathe- matical sciences associate director Professor Nina Evans.
These academics are part of the ISO 8000 Working Group 13 Committee, along with De Jager, and have developed a significant amount of academic content for data quality and related systems. Evans’ work and research focus on information assets in industry and commerce, that of Jacob on large-scale commercial and enterprise data quality for business intelligence and Caballero Muñoz-Reja’s on data quality process assessment and measurement framework models, while Talburt developed master-level academic courses and content.
The Pilog Global Academy will work closely with CPUT, which will also offer the first course this year. The academy will use master data quality solutions material from the Pilog research and development laboratories in Centurion, South Africa, and Hyderabad, India, and will also collaborate with Jacob and Talburt. The UALR lectures are filmed and this video content will also be made available, confirms Talburt.
The collaboration and sharing model envisaged for the academy is already common practice in Pilog, and De Jager aims to improve academic courses and spur their development by connecting academics to a similar industry-practice sharing platform. Pilog’s – and industry’s – projects and records can serve as highly detailed and complex examples to flesh out theo- retical training for students.