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

Developing qualitative benefits

Qualitative benefits are intangible and cannot be quantified with sufficient certainty to be included as quantitative benefits.

Most qualitative benefits relate to the avoidance of different types of risk. They cannot be easily quantified because they are only a probable risk rather than past events where the impact can be accurately measured. Here are some typical data quality risk examples:

  • Impact on compliance risk.
  • Reputational risk – including the perception of the brand and damage to your reputation in terms of customers, suppliers, and employees. Employee dissatisfaction, in particular, can lead to impacts on efficiency in general, and staff retention.
  • Risk of challenges to the delivery of future projects/activities.

This final example could be quantified project by project, and where this is possible, the benefits can be included in the quantified benefits area of the business case. In general, though, the final...