DAMA Adelaide Presentation | DQM, Coherence, and Leadership

Rob Malcolm explores Data Quality Management as a leadership skill - how organisations reconnect data to reality and make better decisions!

Data Quality initiatives rarely fail because of poor tools or missing frameworks.

They fail because organisations lose shared understanding, attention, and accountability under pressure.

In this session, Rob Malcolm discusses Data Quality Management (DQM) as a leadership skill — the way organisations restore coherence, reconnect data to reality, and make reliable decisions.

Instead of competing with the DAMA-DMBOK, this work outlines the conditions needed for DMBOK practices to effectively work in real situations: shared understanding, organisational learning, and behaviour change.

Participants will leave with a clear understanding of:

• Why many “mature” DQ programs still yield poor results
• How noise, fragmentation, and dashboards hinder decision quality
• And how leaders can restore clarity so data remains trustworthy and can be acted upon responsibly

This is not a tools session.

It is a practical, leadership-focused reframing of DQM for organisations operating in complexity.