Informatica Data Quality

If you ever find yourself discussing the benefits of data quality for your business and one of your associates asks rhetorically, "Yes, but can it solve world hunger?" you now have an answer for them.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations records the level of completeness for data collection from each member nation. On their website, their stated mission is to work towards "a world without hunger." A key element in their fight against hunger is the FAO Stat database and a key means of maintaining the efficacy of the data is their data quality dashboard.

For organizations working with the FAO, it's important that the data be accurate - otherwise perishable goods may be wasted by getting shipped to locations not suffering from malnourished populations. This example highlights something that I've seen very often in the context of enterprise data quality initiatives. Many prospective customers come to us and ask "how do we get started, given the complexities of coordinating across multiple organizations inside our company?" Within the Informatica customer base, there are many examples of successful initiatives starting off with Data Quality metrics and dashboards. The metrics offer a great way for organizations to maintain a dialog on how to prioritize their investment in data quality.

Already, I've received email comments on my posting. "Can Data Quality allow us to live longer? Facilitate the exploration of outer space?" Great questions… stayed tuned for future postings!

I attended my first parent-teacher meeting the other day for my five-year old daughter. Another one of those “life stage” events done and dusted – I remember dreading the annual meeting when I was a kid. The notion of my parents and my teacher comparing notes on my behaviour was too much to bear – somebody was eventually going to put two and two together and find out I was up to no good.

It all got me thinking about a recent blog post by my esteemed colleague Garry Moroney. His post Mobilizing the Data Quality Army outlined the level of effort, thought and planning that the US Department of Education is putting into data quality.

As Garry points out dealing with data quality in a large, disconnected organization such as the US schools system is not a trivial exercise. But if you were to only read that one post you might be overwhelmed by the potential size of the data quality task in front of you.
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These days, savvy business executives understand that a report or analysis on their customers, markets, products or anything else is only as good as the data used to compile it. There is always a risk that the data used in the report may not be of sufficiently high quality. Similarly, business partners realize that integrating their systems with another company’s will only add value if the data flowing through the integration meets the required standards.

So more and more the message that data consumers are giving to data providers is: “before I accept this data from you, before I use it in my decision making processes or write it into my systems or pass it on to another party, prove to me that this is high quality data. Prove to me that the data is fit for purpose.
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