What is data quality?

What is data quality?

Studies have repeatedly shown data quality to be a killer for an organization's ability to accomplish CRM objectives. Many CRM applications run against a data warehouse or receive data from a data warehouse. The ideal time to clean data is well before the data lands in the data warehouse. There are many ways operational environments can improve the overall data quality of an organization at the earliest point -- the point of origin.

It is ten times more costly to fix data quality errors in the data warehouse than it is at the point of origin. Primarily, if data entry in operational systems can be constrained to enter valid sets of values, this will be a great help. Since the data warehouse is the place for integrated and cleansed organization data, many environments have "closed the loop" by feeding data warehouse data back to organizational environments for just this purpose.

For example, if a name is being entered, automatic fill-in is a handy data quality assist. If a product is being entered, it should be from an up-to-date drop-down list. If appropriate, data being entered that is "new" can be compared against previously entered similar (including phonetically similar) data and the entry function can be prompted with "are you sure" type prompts.

This is not always possible since many deal with complex, older technology operational systems that are not easily changed. Many of these systems were written without an understanding

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of data quality and change control on them will be many months and involve a major cross-functional effort. In the next tip, we?ll talk about managing data quality at the data warehouse level.

For more information, check out SearchCRM's Best Web Links on Data Quality.


This was first published in April 2002

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