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

The hierarchy of strategy, objectives, processes, analytics, and data

If you have followed the process outlined in the Understanding strategy, objectives, and challenges section, you should have at this point a list of data quality-related challenges, as well as an idea of the systems and data involved in the challenge. It is likely at this stage that you identified more potential challenges than you can prioritize at this time.

The next step in the process is to review these holistically and select where to put your focus.

Prioritizing using strategy

Having gathered data quality challenges that impact various pillars of a strategy, it is time to take stock. This may involve going back to the strategy team to present your findings.

The following diagram illustrates the typical outcomes of the early discovery meetings.

Figure 5.2 – Strategic pillars by the number of rules and complexity

Figure 5.2 – Strategic pillars by the number of rules and complexity

There is often a particular strategic pillar where...