About the Author

Danette McGilvray is president and principal of Granite Falls Consulting, Inc., a firm specializing in information quality management and data governance to support key business processes around customer satisfaction, decision support, supply chain management, and operational excellence.

For more than ten years she led information quality initiatives at Hewlett-Packard and Agilent Technologies. In her roles as practitioner, program and project manager, and internal consultant, she gained firsthand experience in implementing data quality in projects. She saw the benefits resulting from a focus on information quality in addition to the challenges and opportunities. Her initial work with customer information that supported sales and marketing functions expanded to include all types of information and the integration of data into ERPs and data warehouses.

As principal consultant for Granite Falls, she continues to use her expertise to help clients in many industries. She has seen how organizations, once they understand the benefits of information quality, still face difficulties in implementing data quality-focused projects and integrating important information quality activities into other projects and methodologies. She also recognized those ideas common to all data and all types and sizes of organizations. This, along with her previous experience, led her to develop The Ten Steps methodology—a practical and flexible approach that combines concepts with realistic how-to advice.

Danette is an invited speaker at conferences throughout the United States and Europe. She has been profiled in PC Week and HP Measure Magazine and was an invited delegate to the People’s Republic of China to discuss roles and opportunities for women in the computer field. She is a faculty member for The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) and a member of DMReview.com’s Ask the Expert panel; here business intelligence and data warehousing professionals can ask questions of industry leaders. Danette is a founding member of the International Association for Information and Data Quality Professionals (IAIDQ) and an active member of DAMA International. She authored best practices highlighted in Larry P. English’s Improving Data Warehouse and Business Information Quality, which is a highly regarded book about information quality and value.

Danette graduated with honors from Utah State University in Logan, Utah, with a B.S. in Business Information Systems and minored in Business Administration.

Currently, Danette resides in the San Francisco Bay area with her husband, Jeff. You can contact her at www.gfalls.com.