What is data quality?
Data quality is essentially a measure of how clean your data is. What is “clean” data you might ask? When your data is filled with inconsistencies, gaps, and errors – which is likely the case when dealing with legacy systems that rely heavily on one or more manual entry points – it can be described as “unclean data”. This would score low on a measure of data quality.
On the other hand, when your data is structured, follows consistent rules and formatting, and is subject to levels of control that restrict what can and cannot be entered into a system, then your data is “clean”, and thereby would score high on a measure of data quality.
Identifying poor data quality
FlightPath is a tool that can be used to identify and report issues with data quality. It does this by using a combination of predefined and business-defined data quality rules, ensuring that your data meets both industry and your own business standards. The business rules you define can be as tolerant as you want them to be.
Where data records are found to fail one or more of these rules, they will be flagged and reported for each instance that they failed on. FlightPath as a tool comes with the ability to display data quality results in a dashboard to help monitor the severity and magnitude of your data quality problems, as well as the progress that is being made in fixing them.
Why is data quality important?
Whether you are a small business owner, or the CIO of a large organisation, data quality should matter to you. With poor data quality, you deny yourself the opportunity to draw meaningful and competitively advantageous insights from your data, and leave yourself open to potentially higher storage costs. Even more importantly, you put yourself at increased risk of falling short of data governance and Data Security requirements, which could result in large fines and penalties.
If your data is not structured and you cannot guarantee with a satisfactory degree of certainty that what you hold is reliable, stored efficiently, selectively accessible, and subject to data governance measures and practices as required by law, then you are suffering from poor data quality.
For example, imagine you are the owner of Simply Sandwiches, a chain of high street stores that sells sandwiches. As part of a marketing campaign, you offered customers the opportunity to win a lifetime award of a free daily sandwich if they entered a raffle simply by providing their name and contact information, plus their three favourite sandwich fillings, via your website. You now must ask yourself the following questions:
- How do I store this information?
- How likely are there to be mistakes in the data (e.g. spelling errors)?
- Who has access to this data?
- If a customer were to request that I remove all data that I have relating to them, am I able to locate it all and subsequently remove it in a timely manner?
- Am I able to use this data to gain insights and get a competitive edge over other sandwich shops?
With good data quality, you should be able to answer all the above questions swiftly and confidently.
Fixing poor data quality
Once you have an idea of where your data quality can be improved, logic can be written and ran over your data to transform it from a poor state into one that passes the rules that were used to identify the issues in the first place, thereby enhancing your data quality. One of the best opportunities to perform this activity is when migrating between systems, giving you the chance to part with bad data duality practices present in legacy systems, and establish best practices going forward in your new systems.
Preventing poor data quality from reoccurring
When FlightPath is deployed as a long-term solution to transfer data between systems, the same rules and logic that was used to identify and subsequently fix the data can be embedded in the process to ensure that your data is seamlessly cleansed as it is being moved. Again, this can be combined with data quality dashboards to ensure that you have a complete picture of the state of your data at any given time, and will flag if there are any other areas of improvement required.
To discover more about our range of accelerators read out recent article on ‘Accelerating delivery through innovation‘.
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Accelerate your data
Contact Dufrain today or call us on 0800 130 3656 to schedule a demonstration or find out more about FlightPath.
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