Managing Data Quality Across the Enterprise Is Everyone’s Business

There is a direct link between the quality of your company’s data and its business performance. High-quality data keeps your company competitive and thriving in turbulent economic times. Your company needs complete, consistent, accurate, and current information to operate at peak levels of efficiency, to comply with regulations, and to manage risk.

Poor data quality is expensive. Inaccurate, incomplete, or unreliable data can lead to poor business decisions, inferior customer service, supply chain disruptions, weak risk management, and the inability to comply with financial reporting and other types of regulations.

Your IT organization’s job is to provide the business with complete, accurate, and current data more quickly, at lower costs, and with fewer resources. IT is responsible for moving and managing data—which includes automated data quality processes. IT is expected to resolve data quality problems when it lacks the knowledge, resources, and the budget to wholly own data quality.

Many expensive, high-profile customer relationship management (CRM), business intelligence (BI), and enterprise resource planning (ERP) projects have failed because of data quality problems. When the quality of all master data domains (e.g., customer, supplier, product, asset, and finance data) has not been addressed, the reports that these applications are designed to produce are inaccurate. Business users lose confidence in the data, and the project collapses.

What’s the solution?

Joint Ownership and Management

Instead of being the exclusive domain of IT, data quality must be jointly owned and managed by IT and the business.

The business must sponsor and drive data quality initiatives. Line-of-business data stewards and data analysts are responsible for identifying data quality business rules, setting data quality targets, and monitoring data quality.

IT is responsible for the technology infrastructure that executes data quality rules across the organization, so that high levels of data quality can be achieved “beyond the silo.”

And an effective data governance program—one that establishes a framework of standards and accountability for effective data quality processes across the organization—must be executed and maintained.

Informatica can help.

Informatica’s data quality solution provides the technology and the methodology to support data quality processes across the whole enterprise—ensuring that all data is complete, consistent, accurate, and current, regardless of where it resides.