We’ve all heard the old adage “what you don’t know won’t hurt you.” But when it comes to heart disease popular wisdom isn’t true. In fact, what you don’t know about your heart health may very well hurt you, whether or not there are symptoms. Of course, we all know what we should do to prevent heart disease, like eating well and getting tested on a regular basis. But we don’t always do what we should do, do we…

Now I’m not here to prescribe medical advice, but I do see an interesting parallel between heart disease and data integration. Data integration processes can be compared to a circulatory system for data, a network of arteries that span Business Applications and Business Analytics, and just like actual arteries they can be either “normal” or “diseased.” In other words, data integration processes can either move data that is of high quality or they can move bad data that can “clog up” the process leading to the proliferation of bad data or causing the integration process itself to fail. You can think about data integration without Data Quality as a “diseased” artery. So the question is whether your data integration processes look like a “normal” or a “diseased” artery. If you think you need to get your data quality tested, or go on a proverbial data quality diet, read about a unified approach for Data Integration and Data Quality or take the Data Quality checkup that will help you achieve the data integration equivalent of healthy arteries.