by Angela Guess
A recent blog post by Rick Sherman examines how companies can root out “dirty data” through data remediation: “business needs accurate information and that often requires going back to rework and fix data to eliminate data-quality issues. Data needs be checked for completeness, conformity, consistency, duplicates, integrity, and accuracy. A 2007 survey of more than 1,000 middle managers of large companies in the United States and United Kingdom conducted by Accenture revealed that ‘Middle managers spend more than a quarter of their time searching for information necessary to their jobs, and when they do find it, it is often wrong.’ (The emphasis is mine.) What do you want to bet that this hasn’t changed since then?”
Sherman insists that proper data remediation is key to doing good business, stating, “The earlier in a process that you find defects the easier and less disruptive it is to fix them. YOU want to be the one to find the problems, not your customer. With auto manufacturing, defects found in design or manufacturing can be handled internally. But defects found by the customer mean expensive, embarrassing recalls that end up on the evening news. And even worse for the food or pharmaceutical industry, defects can be deadly to their customers.”
Sherman continues, “Enterprise Data Management (EDM) is the proactive approach to ensuring data is transformed into consistent, accurate and timely business information. And if there are data issues, you can discover them with auditing and data lineage rather than scrambling through macros in spreadsheets. A patch-work of stopgap measures is costly and you are not likely to solve data quality issues in a reactive manner, i.e. data remediation.”
photo credit: gillntonic
