The easiest data is always the hardest to model w/ Karen Lopez

About this episode

Have you ever had a tax form sent to the wrong address, a credit card with no suspicious activity get deactivated, or been billed for a service you’ve never used? If so, you may be the victim of poor data modeling.

Join Tim, Juan and Karen Lopez, aka @datachick from InfoAdvisors, to discuss what assumptions people and applications make about the simplest data. We’ll also try and answer the question, “why are phone numbers, and addresses so damn hard to model?!?”

This episode features

• Why modeling simple things is harder than it seems, and what we can do about it

• The best and worst data modeling fails

• If Sports Illustrated had an issue dedicated to data models, what would be on the cover?

Key takeaways

• “One man’s lookup table is another man’s universe”

• Generalized modeling (vs specific modeling)

• Don’t forget the cost of needing to document and maintain kinds of institutional knowledge