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

Getting Started with a Data Quality Initiative

One of the most stressful points of a data quality initiative for those involved is the immediate few weeks following the approval of the business case. The approval is the starting gun for the delivery of the first set of data quality rules. There will be a clear commitment to a deadline – and meeting the deadline will be essential to keeping within the agreed budget.

Every week of delay will lead to a significant additional cost and the risk of having to go back to the approval group to request more budget.

This chapter outlines everything that will be on the agenda in those first few weeks and gives some guidance on how to keep all the “plates spinning.” It will help you to identify the various workstreams of activity that need to be put in place and the types of people that you need to find to staff those workstreams.

Therefore, in this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • The first few...