Why do we need data quality?
Data quality is a crucial aspect of managing data assets in organizations. High-quality data is essential for making informed business decisions, but poor data quality can lead to issues such as bad data and data quality problems. Data quality solutions require a combination of data governance, data standardization, and measuring data quality.
Business leaders have repeatedly expressed little confidence in the reliability of the data they use to run their businesses.
In KPMG’s 2017 CEO Study, nearly half of the CEOs surveyed shared concern about the integrity of the data on which they base their decisions.
Table of Contents
How to improve data quality
Data Profiling
One of the key challenges in ensuring data quality is identifying data quality issues. Data profiling can help identify areas of poor data quality, such as defined data, bad data, or inconsistent data. Data profiling tools can also help measure data quality by analyzing data consistency, completeness, and accuracy.
Machine learning
Machine learning can be used to improve data quality in real-time. By using machine learning algorithms, organizations can identify patterns in customer data and business processes that can lead to poor data quality. This can help prevent data quality issues before they occur and ensure good data quality.
Data Governance
Data governance is another key aspect of ensuring data quality. By establishing data governance policies and standards, organizations can ensure that data is collected, stored, and managed in a consistent and standardized way. This can help prevent poor data quality and ensure that data is usable and reliable.
Data Cleansing
Data standardization is also important for ensuring good data quality. By standardizing data formats and structures, organizations can ensure that data is consistent across different supply chains and business processes. This can help prevent data quality problems and ensure that data is of high quality.
In conclusion, ensuring data quality is essential for managing data assets in organizations.
Measuring data quality, identifying data quality issues, and using machine learning to improve data quality are all key aspects of ensuring good data quality. Data governance and data standardization are also important for preventing poor data quality and ensuring that data is consistent and usable. By prioritizing data quality, organizations can make informed business decisions and ensure that their data assets are reliable and trustworthy.
Errors in data mean much more than bad decisions.
Data quality is about having the right information, in the right place, for analytics and operational support.
Errors in data mean much more than bad decisions. For every business process, data errors create risks and increase costs.
Quality data is commonly defined as data that is fit for purpose. As data moves through the enterprise, its purpose changes. Data that is of high quality for one use may be of poor quality for another.
We provide sustainable, scalable, enterprse data quality solutions to deliver trusted information, no matter where it enters and how it flows through your enterprise.
Fueling Enterprise Data Governance with Data Quality
Data quality is a business function that should be supported by IT.
Data quality is a fundamental business function because it directly impacts the overall success and efficiency of an organization. Trusted data is the foundation for successful operations, analytics and planning.- ensuring that the data supporting operations, decision making and planning are fit for purpose - irrespective of when, how or why they entered the organisation. Here are some key reasons why data quality is essential for businesses:
Informed Decision-Making
High-quality data provides accurate and reliable information that enables informed decision-making. When organizations have confidence in the data they rely on, they can make strategic choices based on accurate insights. Trusted data is the foundation for successful operations, analytics and planning.- ensuring that the data supporting operations, decision making and planning are fit for purpose - irrespective of when, how or why they entered the organisation.Poor data quality, on the other hand, can lead to erroneous conclusions, misguided decisions, and potentially costly mistakes.
Operational Efficiency
Data quality is crucial for efficient business operations. Inaccurate or incomplete data can lead to errors, delays, and inefficiencies in various processes. By ensuring data quality, organizations can streamline their operations, reduce errors, and optimize workflows. Clean and reliable data enables smoother processes and enhances overall productivity.
Customer Satisfaction
Data quality is closely tied to customer satisfaction. Inaccurate or outdated customer information can result in poor customer service, ineffective marketing campaigns, and lost opportunities. High-quality customer data allows organizations to deliver personalized experiences, targeted marketing, and timely support, leading to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Compliance and Risk Management
Many industries have stringent regulations and compliance requirements regarding data handling and privacy. Ensuring data quality is essential for organizations to meet these regulatory obligations. Poor data quality can result in compliance breaches, legal issues, and reputational damage. Additionally, accurate data helps identify and mitigate risks, enabling proactive risk management strategies.
Business Insights and Analytics
Data quality is critical for deriving meaningful insights and conducting accurate data analysis. Reliable data enables organizations to identify trends, patterns, and correlations that can drive business growth. With high-quality data, organizations can perform advanced analytics, predictive modelling, and data-driven forecasting to gain a competitive advantage in the market.
Cost Savings
Poor data quality can be costly for businesses. Data errors and inaccuracies can lead to wasted resources, redundant efforts, and increased operational expenses. By investing in data quality management, organizations can prevent these unnecessary costs and allocate resources more efficiently.
Trust and Reputation
Data quality is closely linked to an organization's trust and reputation. Inaccurate or misleading data erodes trust among stakeholders, including customers, partners, and investors. On the contrary, organizations that prioritize data quality demonstrate a commitment to accuracy, reliability, and professionalism, enhancing their reputation in the market.
In summary, data quality is a crucial business function because it enables informed decision-making, enhances operational efficiency, improves customer satisfaction, ensures compliance and risk management, supports data analytics, saves costs, and fosters trust and reputation. By recognizing data quality as a critical aspect of their operations, businesses can unlock the full potential of their data and drive sustainable growth.
However, ensuring quality data is an ongoing function that may include a combination of automated checks and validations, automated data cleansing and matching, and manual data scrubbing or remediation.
The IT Role in delivering Data Quality solutions
IT plays a significant role in supporting data quality initiatives.
Here are some reasons why IT support is essential for effective data quality management:
Data Integration
IT is responsible for integrating data from various sources, such as databases, applications, and external systems. This involves extracting, transforming, and loading (ETL) data to create a unified and consistent view. IT professionals can enforce data quality standards during the integration process, ensuring that data is accurate, complete, and free from inconsistencies.
Data Validation and Cleansing
IT can develop and implement automated processes to validate and cleanse data. By leveraging data profiling tools and technologies, IT professionals can identify anomalies, errors, and duplicates within datasets. They can then establish data cleansing procedures to rectify these issues and improve data quality.
What is a data quality solution?
Gartner defines data quality solutions as a set of tools, techniques, and processes implemented to ensure that data within an organization is accurate, consistent, complete, and reliable. It involves addressing issues related to data integrity, consistency, validity, and overall quality.
Data quality solutions typically involve several key components:
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Data profiling: This involves analyzing data to understand its structure, content, and quality. Data profiling tools help identify anomalies, inconsistencies, and errors in the data.
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Data cleansing: Data cleansing involves correcting or removing errors, inconsistencies, or duplicates within the data. It may include processes such as standardization, validation, and enrichment to improve data accuracy.
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Data validation: This process involves checking data against predefined rules, standards, or patterns to ensure its accuracy and validity. Validation rules can be applied during data entry or data integration processes.
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Data enrichment: Data enrichment involves enhancing the existing data by adding additional information from external sources. This can include appending demographic data, geolocation data, or other relevant information to improve the value and completeness of the data.
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Data governance: Data governance refers to the overall management of data within an organization. It includes defining data quality standards, establishing data quality metrics, and implementing policies and procedures to ensure ongoing data quality.
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Data monitoring and reporting: Continuous monitoring and reporting of data quality metrics are essential to identify issues or anomalies and take appropriate actions to maintain and improve data quality. This can involve setting up alerts, dashboards, and regular reporting to track data quality performance.
The ultimate goal of a data quality solution is to ensure that data is reliable, consistent, and accurate, enabling organizations to make informed decisions, improve operational efficiency, and gain insights from their data assets.
Delivering“peak condition” information fit for your business
Our goal is simple: to deliver “peak condition” information fit for your business, however, wherever and whenever you need it.
We provide Enterprise Data Quality Solutions that can scale to the needs of your enterprise, yet can ensure correct and consistent data at every touchpoint.
Our data quality solutions range from:
- the delivery of a quick data audit in support of any data-intensive project,
- once-off data migrations and cleansing projects
- a data quality strategy aligned to your data governance goals,
- batch cleansing and matching projects - for example, to support a data warehouse
- application data management with native plugins for popular CRM and ERP systems such as Microsoft Dynamics® and SAP® to ensure trusted, reliable and consistent data.
- real-time data validation and enrichment at point of capture - address validation, geocoding, telephone and email validation.
We help you to move beyond a limited, application-centric view of data quality to ensure consistent application of data governance policies and standards across all applications in your architecture.
15 years African data quality solution experience
Our consultants have delivered solutions for a range of data areas - including Product/Materials Data, Financial Systems, Real Estate Management, HR/Employee Data, Supplier Data, Customer Data and Name & Address Data.
We have worked in a number of industries - including banking, insurance, government, telecommunications, hospitality, mining and manufacturing - in a number of African countries.
We understand the complexities of managing African data - including multiple languages, minimal standards and a lack of reference data and our methodologies address these complexities for the best results.
When Absa Capital needed to improve client static data quality they turned to Master Data Management and Precisely Trillium
Read the Absa Capital data quality case study to learn more
FAQ
What is data quality?
Data quality is commonly defined as data that is fit for purpose s- typically referring to the degree to which data is accurate, complete, consistent, and timely within a particular context. It is important to ensure that data is of high quality in order to make informed decisions, conduct meaningful analyses, and avoid errors and inaccuracies in business operations.
Why is data quality important?
High-quality data is essential for making informed decisions and conducting accurate analyses. Poor-quality data can lead to errors, inaccuracies, and biases, which can have serious consequences, particularly for machine learning It can also waste time and resources by requiring additional effort to clean and correct the data.
How can data quality be measured?
There are various ways to measure data quality, including assessing accuracy, completeness, consistency, timeliness, and relevance. Metrics such as error rates, missing values, and data duplication can also be used to evaluate data quality.
At Master Data Management, we believe strongly that data quality metrics should be relatable to business - for example, measuring "email deliverability" may be more meaningful than "Email accuracy", even if this is ultimately the same measure.
Who is responsible for ensuring data quality?
Everyone who works with data is responsible for ensuring data quality. This includes data analysts, data scientists, database administrators, and business users. Data governance policies and procedures can help to establish accountability for data quality across an organisation.
How can data quality be improved?
There are several strategies that makeup enterprise data quality solutions, including data profiling, data cleansing, data standardisation, and data enrichment. It is also important to establish data governance policies and procedures to ensure that data is consistently managed and maintained.
Automation plays a key role in ensuring data quality at scale.
What are some common sources of data quality issues?
Common sources of data quality issues include data entry errors, data duplication, inconsistent data formats, missing data, and outdated data. Poor data management practices can also contribute to data quality issues.
What is the difference between data quality and master data management?
In summary, data quality is about improving the overall quality of data across the organization, while MDM is about creating and managing a single, trusted, and authoritative source of master data for the organization. While data quality is a prerequisite for MDM, MDM must include mechanisms for sharing quality data across various platforms where it is used.
What are some best practices for maintaining data quality?
Robust data quality solutions include best practices such as establishing data governance policies and procedures, regularly profiling and monitoring data quality, implementing data validation rules, and providing training and support for data management and analysis. It is also important to regularly review and update data quality metrics to ensure that they remain relevant and effective.
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