Enterprise Knowledge Management

3

DATA QUALITY IN PRACTICE

In this chapter, we explore what data quality means and how it can be effected in the enterprise. Without a definition for data quality, how can we ever hope to improve it? And since everybody has a different idea as to what data quality means, how can we level-set the members of an organization so that an improvement in data quality can be measured and recognized?

With the simple definition of data quality as “fitness for use,” we can start to plan how to improve data quality across the organization. We first outline our procedure for a data quality improvement program, which incorporates the gaining of senior management consensus, training, analysis, and implementation in a way that allows for a continuous improvement ...