by Angela Guess
Loraine Lawson of IT Business Edge recently interviewed Jim Harris regarding why it is so difficult to get business executives concerned about data quality. Harris commented, “The concept of data has shifted tremendously, because it’s entered the mainstream because more and more of our world has become directly digitized, so more and more of our world is directly data and any Internet and mobility have played a huge part of this. Some people in the data quality profession have gotten excited about this and said, ‘Oh, OK, well now that data is everywhere, more and more people know what data is and it’s not a weird, geeky concept anymore, that means everyone is going to care about data quality now, right?’”
He answers, “No. The problem that happens is we cross the threshold from no one noticed it to everyone notices it, but when everyone notices it, nobody notices it, because it just blends into the background. The example that I always use is music. Music is a form of data and the early days of any type of data delivery to the world, there needed to be a physical thing that brought that data to you. In the early days, that used to be a vinyl record. Then we had audio cassettes, then we had CDs, then we had MP3 files and other forms of digital file formats… So the problem there is, OK, so now the data is everywhere, so do we care about the quality? Well, audiophiles will say that vinyl records sound better than CDs, and they do. And they’ll also say that CDs sound better than MP3s, and they do. But the thing is, if you don’t care, then you don’t care.”
