Book Image

Practical Data Quality

By : Robert Hawker
Book Image

Practical Data Quality

By: Robert Hawker

Overview of this book

Poor data quality can lead to increased costs, hinder revenue growth, compromise decision-making, and introduce risk into organizations. This leads to employees, customers, and suppliers finding every interaction with the organization frustrating. Practical Data Quality provides a comprehensive view of managing data quality within your organization, covering everything from business cases through to embedding improvements that you make to the organization permanently. Each chapter explains a key element of data quality management, from linking strategy and data together to profiling and designing business rules which reveal bad data. The book outlines a suite of tried-and-tested reports that highlight bad data and allow you to develop a plan to make corrections. Throughout the book, you’ll work with real-world examples and utilize re-usable templates to accelerate your initiatives. By the end of this book, you’ll have gained a clear understanding of every stage of a data quality initiative and be able to drive tangible results for your organization at pace.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Part 1 – Getting Started
6
Part 2 – Understanding and Monitoring the Data That Matters
10
Part 3 – Improving Data Quality for the Long Term

Best Practices and Common Mistakes

The opportunity to write a book about data quality has allowed me to reflect on my work across several different organizations and industries. It has driven me to identify the commonalities between the different initiatives and focus hard on what went well and why. Conversely, I have also had to reflect on what didn’t go well and why, which was a less enjoyable experience!

In doing this, I have identified several best practices that I would like to highlight. I have also organized the examples where initiatives didn’t go to plan into common themes.

The entire book is about identifying best practices and common mistakes. Where they already exist elsewhere in the book, they will be referenced rather than repeated, but I felt it was useful to have everything in one place here in this chapter. Some completely new items did not fit with the context of the other chapters.

In each case, the best practice or mistake has been selected...