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

Monitoring Data Against Rules

After all the hard work prioritizing and collecting data quality rules, monitoring starts to provide the desired payoff.

Monitoring is about organizing the rules you have developed into a set of reports and dashboards that help an organization take action.

Until this point, you have probably only seen your data quality rules in action against test data. This is the point where you will finally judge your data against the rules that you have established and you will see for the first time where the gaps are.

This can bring up conflicted feelings. As a data quality professional, you are hoping that there will be gaps in the data identified by the rules. If you do all this hard work and then find there are few or only inconsequential gaps, then you will have some explaining to do (this has never happened in all my experience!). However, if you are invested in the organization, seeing these gaps can be quite worrying. What is important to remember...