What Is Data Quality? How To Manage It?

What Is Data Quality?

Data quality considers criteria like correctness, consistency, integrity, and usability when determining the state of your data. A perfect score in each of these areas indicates high-quality data, which is the optimum type to employ for processing and analysis.

One of your company’s most valuable resources is data. Poor data quality practices can cost businesses a loss in their revenue. The quality of the data you feed your business intelligence is only as good as the data you supply it. Make sure your data analysis isn’t losing value because the data it’s fed isn’t correct.

Today data-driven organizations increasingly rely on insights, customer databases, and marketing efforts and drive vital business decisions from these data thus high-quality data has become increasingly important. Inconsistent or incomplete data can erode client trust and harm your standing in the market.

How to measure the quality of the data?

It is required to assess the quality of data regularly to make sure that the data is working to its full potential. According to a Gartner study, there are six points of reference for data quality management:

1. Consistency: When data is stored in multiple locations, check whether the values are the same.
2. Accuracy: data should accurately describe the properties of the object it is meant to model
3. Relevance: data should be appropriate to support the objective
4. Existence: the organization have the right data to use
5. Integrity: relationships between data elements and data sets should be accurate
6. Validity: the values should be acceptable

The majority of businesses rely on software to detect and repair errors. Data quality technologies, which ensure that an organization’s data is clean and valuable, are plentiful. Many programmes include capabilities like programme management, responsibilities, use cases, and procedures (such as monitoring, remediating, and reporting data quality) as well as organizational structure creation. Informatica Data Quality, Microsoft Data Quality Services, and Oracle Enterprise Data Quality are some of the most popular current market products.

Your data can be repaired if it isn’t in good shape. The four steps below can be used to develop a strategy for overcoming data quality issues.

1. Establish data oversight departments and executives, and provide them with the tools they need to establish effective quality standards.
2. It is important to measure the value of your data. Measure the quality of your information assets, as well as the cost of poor-quality data. These figures can be directly linked to critical business measures.
3. Estimate the length of time it will take to deploy data quality software. Many businesses wrongly estimate this amount of time which results in mistrust between business operations and information technology.
4. Make the most of your data quality software. Because this type of software isn’t cheap, keep your costs down by remaining adaptable and focusing on value while maintaining your high standards.

Data quality management strategy

To avoid a data crisis, you’ll need a solid data management strategy. Data management is possible with the help of a team that will be stewarding operations. A CDO to assure top-level management engagement, a programme manager to oversee daily activities, and a business analyst to establish organizational needs and ensure that they are communicated to developers.

Another important aspect of data management is Data Profiling. Reviewing the data, comparing it to metadata, running statistical models, and final reporting are all steps in the process. Data profiling provides a starting point for the process and aids in the establishment of standards within the company. In the management process, data repair can come after profiling. It includes determining why and how data errors occurred, as well as the most efficient strategy for repairing them.

Conclusion

To conclude we can say that data quality is an essential part of an organization. It’s critical for increased operational efficiency, cost savings, and a data-driven decision-making foundation. A successful analytics operation is easier to manage and more accurate with high-quality data, even when faced with quickly expanding volumes, and will give dynamic insights to everyone.

Also Read: Big Data – The Strategic Ally Of Electronic Commerce