Bad information – a management problem 24 September 2009
Posted by Ola Wallinder in Business Improvements, Data quality.Tags: business case, business rules, definitions, information models
2 comments
A year ago I did not know of any CEO who had master data or data quality on the top management agenda. Now I know several of them – and it seems that the more I ask, the more interest I get from C-level executives. The thing is that while BI users and sponsors have built data warehouses for a decade or so – and nowadays competition and cost reduction demands increase ever as much – the need for high quality data rapidly increase.
The problem is that most C-level executives – and their BI managers and owners – do not know HOW to approach this issue. What´s your experience of improving data quality ? What´s the best practice approach to HOW ?
One approach is of course to start by using data quality tools with a set of predefined business rules. By using those you will fairly quickly being able to identify fundamental issues and improvements. However, the root causes are usually not easily found (ask why, why, why, why and why again). After a while you will probably come up with some key areas such as:
- Lack of commonly implemented information models
- Various ways of doing the same business activities in support systems
- Different data definitions implemented in support systems
- Lack of business rules of who and when to create, update and delete critical data
Now – this is a management problem !
But, back again – HOW do you solve this. HOW do you involve the business ? What´s the business case ?
