And We'll Never Be Royals...

In the comments section of the YouTube video of Royals, Ella Yelich-O'Connor (a.k.a. Lorde) writes:

"...a lot of people think teenagers live in this world like 'Skins' every weekend or whatever, but truth is, half the time we aren't doing anything cooler than playing with lighters, or waiting at some $#!**^ train stop...".

As of late there are a lot of people out there who are beginning to think being a data management professional (a.k.a. DataGeek) is somewhat glamorous. While some Data Scientists are getting called sexy, I've got to tell you, most of us in the data trenches aren't too worried about the sexy, we're just doing what we do and doing it right. So, what are we doing more than "half the time" (we...just...plain...don't...do...things...halfway)?

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We're doing things like:

answering questions, teaching, and mentoring people about data

speaking with internal and external clients about our data

requirements gathering and analysis, data architecture, data modeling, and database development

database administration tasks such as making sure the databases are safe, secure, performing well, and are generally in a healthy state

working and collaborating with product people, project managers, software developers, etc...

operational data quality tasks including data cleanups, data profiling, and data monitoring

data governance tasks such as determining and negotiating policies for our data

data and database change management

planning for new data to support our business missions, determining the best sources of data to meet the mission objectives and then acquiring the data

data loading, which I generically call "ETL"

drawing pictures on whiteboards and in tools like Visio, ERWin, and XMind

attending lots of meetings and doing a lot of internal and external marketing

doing data analysis, creating reports and data visualizations, which can sometimes be a little bit sexy

thinking about the future and all the sexy stuff which could be...

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So, no days of "jet planes, islands, tigers on a gold leash". I can't say for sure "we aren't caught up in that love affair...", but just like the teenagers that Lorde is singing about, there's no doubt that we're still going to show up and do our thing every day, sexy or not.

Until next time...Rich