¡Ninguna calidad de los datos!

Just returned from two weeks of conferencing in Sao Paulo and Mexico City. It's been great to interact with folks that I typically don't see or talk to very much, bankers from Venezuela, local government CIOs from Monterrey, IT managers from Mexican car distributors, or Brazilian information architects from shipping companies.

Companies in Latin America and South America seem to suffer from pretty much the same issues as in the rest of the world, however there were a few interesing facts that surfaced in the 1on1 discussions:

• Very high interest in open-source
• Relatively small data volumes overall
  
• Next to no governance or stewardship concepts in information management
• High interest in data quality, but almost no deployments of tools
  
• High fragmentation of data marts, very few enterprise data warehouses

It's particularly interesting, that many technologies and the corresponsing vendors are pretty much unknown, e.g. data profiling, matching, federation, performance management seem to be an almost untapped market, indicating that the vendors have a huge opportunity here in a largely green-field continent. Maybe they should hire some folks able to talk spanish and portuguese...