by Angela Guess
Roger du Mars of Search Data Management recently discussed the importance of selling executives on a top-to-bottom data management plan. He writes, “If corporate executives are faced with a choice between a proactive data quality plan that includes active participation by business users and traditional, IT-led approaches to fixing data quality problems, which will get the nod? The answer might well depend on whether IT managers can get the execs to understand the business ramifications of bad data. Reactive responses to data quality issues are commonplace but often ill-conceived, according to data management analysts. Most pointedly, they said, trying to identify and resolve data errors that have found their way into an organization’s systems takes up valuable time and can cast data quality professionals into a purgatory of inefficient scrambling.”
du Mars continues, “Not being proactive about dealing with data quality shortcomings can be particularly problematic in today’s business environment, with technology driving business processes and data being processed at breakneck speed. ‘Good enough is not good enough’ — the maxim of perfectionists — now applies to data quality like never before. Or, at least, it should, said analysts such as William McKnight, president of McKnight Consulting Group in Plano, Texas. What corporate executives definitely understand is the importance of making good decisions. But do they recognize the connection between the data quality process and sound decision making? ‘Decisions based on quality data can be quality decisions, and the value of a quality decision is almost immeasurable,’ McKnight said.”
