Informatica Perspectives

Many organizations have found that there are several key challenges as they attempt to improve the quality of their data to support all projects and all applications. Data quality technology does not always allow organizations to fix poor data. Why?

The business doesn’t know how big a problem data quality is or its impact on business processes i.e. they don’t care about data quality because they do not know that it’s a problem - there is no visibility or direct link between data quality and business goals for business managers. There is typically no process for systematically measuring the impact of data quality on business processes and building a business case for maintaining high quality data.

For IT to implement data quality processes, they need the business to collaborate to speed up the process. Understanding the data, capturing the business rules and proactively improving data quality over time – all require high levels of collaboration – which is not easy using the most common tools such as spreadsheets and Word documents.

Data Quality is often only associated with customer name and address data – there is very little focus on product, financial and asset data. There are few tools which can build data quality rules for all data domains – often existing products or code are “stretched” to address multiple data domains – however this is only a temporary fix and is not sufficient.

A limited number of applications are benefiting from work performed with data quality tools. Often the data quality team is small and associated with one or two applications or a single department. There is no infrastructure to centrally manage re-usable data quality rules or the infrastructure to deploy the rules across multiple applications in batch mode or more importantly in preventative mode as data is being captured at point of entry.

By addressing all these issues, we can lower the barriers to enterprise data quality and improve business processes with high quality data.

You’ll be seeing more on enterprise data quality with the Informatica 9 launch. Stay tuned.