Tool mentality

The tool mentality is the tendency to focus on the tool as opposed to the task. While knowing how to use and implement a tool is important, knowing how to find and use the right data is the most important skill a data management professional can have. A competent data management professional should be able to come quickly to speed with an 'insert tab A into slot B' automation tools but a person good at using some given 'insert A into slot B' tool may not understand the data. In data profiling, for instance, the successful program critically requires that the team understands what the data is, where the data comes from and what it means, who will use it and who has used it, how the data is processed and why the data is important. In my experience, tools tend to drive a tool-mentality culture that ignores these requirements while a more heavily manual environment tends to create a culture that focuses on these needs. Profiling tools provide the ability to reduce set up time while providing invaluable training to your more junior data profiling personnel and/or allow more expensive personnel to do more, produce the clues to what more in-depth ad-hoc queries are needed to better profile the data and support a documentation structure. Some tools allow me to easily automate and manage data rules (many of the tools needed to meet these requirements are an integral part of modern DBMS) and/or provide the monitoring needed for production profiling (many of these tools are bundled with the DBMS).