You can’t do anything important in your company without high-quality data, and most people suspect, deep down, that their data is not up-to-snuff. They do their best to clean up their data, install software to find errors automatically, and seek confirmation from external sources — efforts I call “the hidden data factory.” It is time-consuming, expensive work, and most of the time, it doesn’t go well.
To Improve Data Quality, Start at the Source
You can’t do anything important in your company without high-quality data. But most organizations focus their data-quality efforts on cleaning up errors, rather than finding and fixing the root cause of the errors in the first place. To become a more data-driven organization, managers and teams must adopt a new mentality — one that focuses on creating data correctly the first time to ensure quality throughout the process.
Part of this process requires identifying two new roles in data quality: the data customer and the data creator. The customer is the person using the data, and the creator is the person who creates, or first inputs, the needed data. People must recognize themselves as customers, clarify their needs, and communicate those needs to creators. People must also recognize themselves as creators, and make improvements to their processes, so they provide data in accordance with their customers’ needs. Once customers and creators have an open dialog, they can work together to make improvements, stopping bad data at its source.