Is Data Mapping and Translation a Solved Problem? 

My neighbor doesn’t understand English, and I know no Spanish.  But we communicate effortlessly thanks to translation utilities readily available with one click.  Why can’t I have the same facility for enterprise data?  Enterprise data dictionaries are one-hundredth the size of human languages.  One would think cross-system mapping would a walk in the park.  If you believe the marketing collateral of many data tools, this utopia arrived some time ago.  Alas, as every data analyst knows, this is just not to.  Cross-system data translation is still a tedious manual affair.  One estimate says that accurately translating 100 variables from one enterprise system to another takes ~2 weeks—or about 1 hour per field!  No consumer would accept a tenth that pain; enterprise data users should not either.  The reality, however, is that solving this problem is not a trivial undertaking.  More on what it will take in upcoming blogs.