Welcome to the World of Environmental Data Management


I've been working in the environmental and water resources consulting business for nearly 20 years and became interested in data management early on. Much of the business world has been driven by the information technology age, learning to make decisions from billions of records and terrabites of data. Sadly, the environmental industry remains generally content with spreadsheets and PDF files, losing the ability to interpret and understand our observations of the air, land and water. In 2011 I am going to maintain this blog with my observations and opinions relating to environmental data management and perhaps generate some dialogue on how we, as an industry, can do better.

Friday, January 7, 2011

Six Sigma Approach to Sustainable Institutional Environmental Data Management

I'd like to thank Chris French for sharing more about his environmental data management work at Honeywell.  He provided me with a research paper presented at GeoCongress 2008 which further describes his analysis of the cost savings associated with environmental data management. (Download Six Sigma Approach to Sustainable Institutional Environmental Data Management)


Chris's paper identifies the following examples of cost savings;

  • For a major site investigation, a $3,000 investment in up-front field data automation generated $100,000 in savings,
  • Standardization of chain-of-custody (COC) and electronic data reporting resulted in savings of 5% in data management time for COC management, time savings of between 0.5 and 1.0 hours per EDD, and a reduction of time of 20 hours per report draft, and
  • Automation resulted in a 50% savings on a data validation effort ($50,000) and a 70% savings on reporting associated with a data intensive investigation effort subject to strict regulatory requirements.
Way to go Chris!  Does anybody else out there in the environmental community have more good examples of tangible cost savings?
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