by Angela Guess
Jim Harris has written a new piece for Information Management regarding the concepts of business relativity and data myopia. Harris explains, “Since how data quality is defined has a significant impact on how data quality is perceived, measured, and managed, in this post I examine the two most prevalent perspectives on defining data quality, real-world alignment and fitness for the purpose of use, which respectively represent what I refer to as the danger of data myopia and the challenge of business relativity.”
He continues, “Whether it’s an abstract description of real-world entities (i.e., master data) or an abstract description of real-world interactions (i.e., transaction data) among entities, data is an abstract description of reality. The creation and maintenance of these abstract descriptions shapes the organization’s perception of the real world… The inconvenient truth is that the real world is not the same thing as the digital worlds captured within our databases.”
Harris goes on, “Creating and maintaining these digital worlds is no easy task, which is exactly the danger inherent with the real-world alignment definition of data quality — when the organization’s data quality efforts are focused on minimizing the digital distance between data and the constantly changing real world that data attempts to describe, it can lead to a hyper-focus on the data in isolation, otherwise known as data myopia.”
