Timothy Valihora studied at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1994. Over the years, he has achieved multiple professional certifications ranging from Oracle Advanced SQL and SQL*Plus to Collibra Data Quality. With over 25 years of expertise, Timothy Valihora excels in IBM InfoSphere Information Server (IIS), offering comprehensive technical architecture, data management, and software development services.
Data quality management is crucial for any organization to make informed decisions and deliver high-quality services. IBM InfoSphere Information Server offers a powerful solution to address this need, providing benefits that can significantly enhance your data management efforts.
IBM InfoSphere Information Server empowers you to investigate, cleanse, and manage your data effectively. It ensures that your data remains accurate and consistent, leading to better decision-making.
Information governance is crucial in today’s data-driven world. This tool lets you maintain consistent views of critical entities like customers, vendors, and products, promoting better governance practices.
In an era where big data is king, InfoSphere Information Server allows you to deliver high-quality data for your big data projects. It seamlessly integrates with your existing data infrastructure.
Furthermore, the platform streamlines operations and reduces redundancy by centralizing data quality management. This not only saves time but also lowers operational costs. Additionally, it provides the capability to integrate data from various sources, making it easier to access and analyze your data assets. Utilizing this platform can give your business a competitive edge. It allows you to harness the full potential of your data, enabling you to stay ahead in today’s data-centric landscape.
IBM InfoSphere Information Server is valuable for any organization seeking to improve data quality management. It ensures data accuracy and promotes efficient information governance, making it an indispensable tool in modern business. Harness its capabilities and watch your data quality and decision-making soar.
An expert in IBM InfoSphere Information Server (IIS) technology, Timothy Valihora specializes in architecture, health checks, installs, programming, and mentoring. He has over 25 years of work experience in data quality, warehousing, conversions, and governance. As president of TVMG Consulting Inc., Timothy Valihora is an expert in “high availability” installs of IBM IIS and extensive use of the IBM IIS IGC “information governance catalog” (metadata workbench, blue print director, business glossary).
A business glossary allows data stewards to define business terms, attributes, and relationships and standardize data definitions across an enterprise in several ways.
Establishing data definition policies and standards
Data standards are a set of rules that guide how data is described, recorded, and shared to ensure mutual understanding among data users and to maintain data quality.
Enforcing compliance by creating a centralized metadata repository
A central repository is a single organizational database unit used to create a single source of truth, providing consistency, visibility, and collaboration within data management.
Providing training and communication
Data stewards educate stakeholders on the importance of standardized data definitions. This helps gain buy-in and ensures proper use and understanding of the data.
Establishing naming conventions for data elements
Naming conventions ensure consistency and reduce ambiguity. Data stewards can define rules for naming data fields, tables, and entities for users to know how to name digital assets so that filenames and titles are consistent and contain all the proper information.
Vero Beach, Florida resident Timothy Valihora graduated from Carleton University, where he studied math, computer science, commerce, and film. For over 25 years, he has provided tech consultation services through his company, TVMG Consulting Inc. Timothy Valihora is keenly interested in protecting personally identifiable information.
Personally identifiable information (PII) is any data that helps organizations identify individuals. Such data may include name, аddress, contact information, gender, financial information, and biometric data. PII can be considered sensitive or non-sensitive data, depending on a person’s privacy expectations. As such, organizations are mandated to protect it against unauthorized access, disclosure, or theft.
Companies can protect PII by implementing proper security measures like firewalls, strong authentication, and encryption for data in transit or at rest to limit access. A proper data protection plan that includes actions for countering data breaches and notifying affected individuals is also vital.
Another measure is for organizations to monitor and audit access to PII using intrusion detection and prevention systems and tools like security information and event management (SIEM) platforms. This measure can help identify and take actions to mitigate anomalies or suspicious activities indicating data leaks or security breaches.
Regularly training employees and contractors handling PII on the importance of data protection and following related policies can also help ensure PII safety. Moreover, educating employees about data theft or disclosure risks and consequences can help them understand the significance of protecting PII.
In terms of hobbies – Tim Valihora – When not in the office – enjoys playing guitar (namely Jackson, Signature and Takamine), drums, squash, tennis, golf and riding his KTM 1290 Super Adventure “R”, BMW 1250 GS Adventure and Ducati MultiStrada V4S motorcycles.
Timothy Valihora is an information technology professional, with nearly 25 years of experience in technical architecture, data warehousing, data conversions, and software development. He is an expert on all IBM Information Server (IIS) applications, notably DataStage, QualityStage, Information Analyzer, and FastTrack. A resident of Vero Beach, Florida; Timothy Valihora is also skilled in the operation of multiple administration tools, including the IBM Stewardship Center.
IBM Stewardship Center is a suite that helps businesses maximize data integrity and overall output. It incorporates a sequence of applications that facilitate prompt resolution of data stewardship demands.
With IBM Stewardship Center, data stewards can conduct comprehensive database searches and send data modification requests. Data stewards can also assess records, including hierarchy records, for accuracy, and also fix duplicate tasks. For performance assessment, IBM Stewardship Center enables data stewards to track ongoing, imminent, and outstanding tasks.
Furthermore, data stewards can access a range of dashboards. These include the work and team performance dashboards, which aid data stewards in tracking both individual and collective tasks. The mobile device management dashboard, which handles a variety of tasks, aids data stewards in task allocation. Data stewards and managers can also deduce information from particular hierarchies using the hierarchy maintenance dashboard.
A data governance program is incomplete without sufficient controls, thresholds, and indices. These are instructive in what data types an organization uses and processes. Given the inevitability of glitches, executives should also develop reporting tools to diagnose and resolve concerns as they arise. Tim Valihora is an expert in ensuring – that “PII” (Personally Identifiable Information) is utilized in a secure fashion. Data Masking and Data Encryption are among the key technologies and approaches that Mr. Valihora has utilized while providing end-to-end Data Governance solutions to over 100 large-scale corporations in Canada, the USA, Asia-Pacific and throughout Europe. Tim Valihora is a US based (Vero Beach, FL) Data Governance specialist within the IBM InfoSphere Information Server (IIS) software suite and is also an expert with respect to Collibra Data Governance Center and Collibra Data Quality (formerly OWL Data Quality.)
Career Highlights for Tim Valihora Include:
Technical Architecture, IIS installations, post-install-configuration, SDLC mentoring, ETL programming, performance-tuning, client-side training (including administrators, developers or business analysis) on all of the over 15 out-of-the-box IBM IIS (InfoSphere Information Server) products
Over 160 Successful IBM IIS installs – Including the GRID Tool-Kit for DataStage (GTK), MPP, SMP, Multiple-Engines, Clustered Xmeta, Clustered WAS, Active-Passive (Server) “Mirroring” and Oracle Real Application Clustered (RAC) “IADB” or “Xmeta” configurations
Extensive experience with creating realistic and achievable Disaster-Recovery (DR) for IBM IIS installations + Collibra Data Quality clusters
IBM MicroServices (MS) (built upon Red Hat Open-Shift (RHOS) and Kubernetes Technology) installations and administration including Information Governance Catalog (IGC) “New”, Information Analyzer (IA) “thin”, Watson Knowledge Catalog (WKC) and Enterprise Search (ES) – on IBM Cloud PAK for Data (CP4D) platforms or IIS v11.7.1.4 “on-prem”
Over 8000 DataStage and QualityStage ETL Jobs Coded
Timothy Valihora is an enterprise data quality senior architect with over 24 years of IT experience and possesses all of the relevant data warehousing and IT development skills. With extensive expertise in the IBM InfoSphere Information Server (IIS), IBM Master Data Management (MDM) and OWL Data Quality (now entitled Collibra Data Quality) software stacks – Timothy Valihora utilizes the Collibra Data Quality, IBM IIS and IBM MDM toolsets which are all fully-scalable (ideally deployed via Apache Spark or RHOS) and adaptive to specific workflows and business needs.
Data governance involves managing and organizing data and related processes to enable workforce collaboration while ensuring that access to data is regulated and compliant. With strict security and privacy mandates, users can utilize data in meaningful ways and create value. Mr. Valihora also specializes in all aspects of Data Governance – in order that large scale corporations can remain complaint in terms of the California Consumer Protection Act + General Data Privacy Regulations etc.
In general – unified & properly “governed” data is challenging to organize and use and may compromise security. One example involves data inconsistencies pertaining to a single customer, such that name and personal details (“PII”) differ across logistics, service, and sales systems. Not only is intelligence about the customer potentially based on faulty information affecting marketing decisions, but the customer may receive subpar services as a result.
Mr. Valihora is an expert on how to use sophisticated software stacks such as IBM MDM, IBM InfoSphere Information Server, OWL Data Quality and Collibra Data Quality to ensure that customer data is properly governed within a given organization and leveraged to gain proper advantage due to the correct “Master Rows” being built from disparate sources and targets, accordingly.
A platform such as Collibra Data Quality, coupled with organizational transparency and accountability, helps ensure that management and employees adhere to the same processes when handling and safeguarding data. Not only is access to sensitive data restricted and apportioned to the appropriate people, however – how it is used and changed is often documented + captured – in a “real time” (or near-real-time) format.
Collibra’s stewardship management interface enables team roles and responsibilities to be defined, with data shared specific to projects and actual user needs. This allows errors and misapplications of data to be examined and the root causes of issues identified.
Tim Valihora is an industry leading expert with respect to Collibra Data Quality, IBM InfoSphere Master Data Management, IBM InfoSphere Information Server – DataStage, QualityStage, Information Governance Catalog, FastTrack, Stewardship Center (BPM), Information Governance Dashboard – featuring Cognos (IGD), Watson Knowledge Catalog, Enterprise Search, QualityStage address standardization + certification, Subscription Manager, the Grid Toolkit for DataStage and DataStage “Balanced Optimization.”
Advantages of Collibra Data Quality (formerly OWL Data Quality) include the leveraging of “behavioral data quality rules” which use proprietary algorithms to auto-generate “behavioral rules” which can – then in turn – utilizing a “base” input data set (or disparate data-sets) to isolate day-to-day – anomalies i.e. as input data changes. Once setup and operational – the OWL Data Quality workflow can analyze data on a real-time (or near-real-time) basis – devise data quality rules (either coded manually or automatically via the behavior rules functionality)- then trap rule breaks, outliers, duplicates, pattern (or rule) breaks, shape anomalies and – as such generate meaningful – data quality “scorecards” etc.
Mr. Valihora is proficient at installing IBM InfoSphere Information Server on Windows, Linux, Unix and Red Hat Open Shift (for the “MicroServices” tiers of IBM IIS v11.7.1.4 (IGC New, IA lite, Watson Knowledge Catalog and Enterprise Search.)
Tim Valihora has conducted over 5 installations of OWL Data Quality (on Red Hat Linux and Apache Spark clusters.) Over 200 installations of IBM InfoSphere Information Server (on Windows, Unix, Linux and Red Hat Open Shift.) And 6 installations of IBM MDM.
In addition Tim Valihora has coded over 6000 DataStage and QualityStage jobs, 200 OWL Data Quality rules, 80 Collibra Data Quality Rules and dozens of Information Analyzer Data Quality Rules using IA “Workbench” and the newer “MicroServices tier” of IBM IIS (i.e. the IA “thin client data quality UI”) which is deployed exclusively on Red Hat Open Shift technology.
Mr. Valihora – president and CEO of TVMG Consulting LLC – is one of the penultimate ETL & Data Quality performance tuners in North America and currently resides in Vero Beach, Florida.
Timothy Valihora is an IT consultant and the president of TVMG Consulting, Inc. For over 24 years, he has provided services to clients on technical architecture, data warehousing, data conversions, software development, and data governance. Timothy Valihora has worked with organizations on data governance projects, primarily relying on IBM InfoSphere DataStage and presenting over 30 documents to a client’s data governance office.
Business executives in the rapidly evolving data economy face the uphill task of maintaining ethical data practices while forestalling breaches. By implication, executives must align their organizations’ practices with data governance principles to reinforce data integrity.
Sensitization is paramount. Executives must come to terms with the importance of both structured and unstructured data. Subsequently, executives should put measures in place to enlighten employees about the need to approach both data classes with utmost care. Sensitization also involves executives revising data security policies and making the same available to the entire workforce.
Consequently, transparency and accountability are also core principles of data governance. Without these in place, corporations run the risk of diminished public confidence. Executives should also harmonize the various departments of their organizations to proffer diverse solutions to the corresponding challenges of data handling.
Based in Redwood City, California, Timothy Valihora serves as president of TVMG Consulting, Inc., in Ottawa, Canada. He has more than 24 years of experience in technical architecture and data governance. Throughout his career, Timothy Valihora has gained insight into products and tools such as the IBM Cloud Pak for Data and the Red Hat OpenShift product.
IBM Cloud Paks functions as AI-powered software designed to accelerate application modernization across many categories. Red Hat OpenShift, meanwhile, is a platform-agnostic tool that supports both native and Cloud-based applications, allowing these applications to be run wherever they are deployed.
Each category of IBM Cloud Pak Platform features different requirements in regards to Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform compatibility. Individuals and businesses must ensure compatibility before installing and configuring a specific IBM Cloud Pak.
For example, IBM Cloud Pak solutions that have been developed for application versions 4.3.x are only compatible with 4.5.x and 4.6.x OpenShift Container Platform versions of Linux x86. Only a select number of IBM Cloud Paks are compatible with Linux on Power Systems, including version 3.5.0 and IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management 2.2.
To learn more about IBM Cloud Pak and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform compatibility, please visit ibm.com and use the table to determine what version of OpenShift is needed for your IBM Cloud Pak.
For close to 25 years, Timothy Valihora has worked as a management consultant in the information technology sector. During that time, Timothy Valihora earned the skills and experience to become an IBM Information Server (IIS) expert.
The IBM Information Server helps organizations efficiently organize information about their business to quickly access and use it to make data-driven decisions that drive business growth. The latest version of this platform is IBM Information Server v11.7, released in December 2017.
Some of the added capabilities in the latest version include automation and machine learning features to fast-track data storing and discovery and improve the quality of data stored. IBM Information Server v11.7 also has General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) support, enabling organizations to detect policy and regulation violations in structured and unstructured data. Another new feature is safer, expanded, and high-speed connectivity for Hadoop, cloud, and enterprise, allowing many users to analyze massive datasets quickly.
IBM Information Server v11.7 also has a new user interface, which its clients can use to faster and more efficiently collaborate on reports, source files, etc., discover crucial data, and understand information about their business using graphs.
More recently, as of IBM Information Server v11.7.1 Fixpack 3 – Service Pack 3 (i.e., IIS v11.7.1.3 SP3) Mr. Valihora has assisted numerous clients with the Apache Log4j fixes that eliminate the ability of hackers, to compromise an InfoSphere v11.7.x environment via vulnerabilities brought about via Apache Log4j bundled software that is utilized within IBM IIS.
In Addition, Tim Valihora has also – more recently – assisted clients whom have installed and configured IBM Cloud Pak for Data (CP4D) which runs on the Red Hat Open Shift (RHOS) framework.
Tim Valihora has recently assisted multiple clients migrate from IBM IIS v11.7 onto CP4D 3.5.0.0 and CP4D 4.0.0.0 Enterprise and as such remains on the cutting edge of IBM software with respect to Information Server and Cloud PAK for Data.
Tim Valihora has worked on projects with over 100 clients in Globally in terms of Data Integration, IBM InfoSphere Information Server and IBM Cloud PAK for Data – both on-prem and cloud based.
A resident of Vero Beach, Florida, Timothy Valihora is an information technology entrepreneur who serves as the president of TVMG Consulting, Inc. Outside of work, Timothy Valihora enjoys playing tennis.
In 2021, professional tennis player Novak Djokovic had an opportunity to earn the Grand Slam title 53 years after a men’s pro tennis player achieved a Gram Slam. To join the exclusive Gram Slam holders club, a tennis player has to win the four main tennis championships, the Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, and US Open, in the same year. Djokovic won three titles in 2021, except for the US Open, which he lost to Russian professional tennis player Daniil Medvedev.
Don Budge and Rod Laver are the only two professional men’s tennis players to achieve a Grand Slam. Don did in 1938, while Rod earned a Grand Slam twice in 1962 and 1969. In total, only five professional tennis players, including Maureen Connolly (1953), Margaret Court (1970), and Steffi Graf (1988), have achieved a Grand Slam.
An expert in IBM products, Timothy Valihora leverages his experience in consulting with public- and private-sector clients. In his leisure time, Timothy Valihora enjoys sports such as golf. Florida offers golf courses that attract players with their diverse challenges.
One golf course with a distinguished history is Jupiter Hills Club in Tequesta. Designed in 1970 by George Fazio, the course has blended elements from two of his favorite courses, Pine Valley and Merion. In operation for over 50 years, Jupiter Hills Club uses sand from the nearby coastline to create an 18-hole course that challenges players with many steep dunes.
The Tournament Players Club at Sawgrass (TPC Sawgrass) in Ponte Vedra Beach boasts a 40-year-plus history of challenging players. In 1980, designer Pete Dye actualized an idea of then-PGA Commissioner Deane Beman by building a course that required both precision and the ability to drive the ball long distances. The course’s greens utilize irregular layouts. The most notable, at the 17th hole, is the Island Green, featuring a body of water as a border.
Other Florida courses attract players due to the fame of their designers/players. Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer created the King & Bear Golf Course at World Golf Village in St. Augustine. Since its opening in 2000, the course has hosted multiple tournaments including the Korn Ferry King & Bear Classic in 2020, with world-class players.
Timothy Valihora's WordPress Blog 