13 May 2010

Data quality 'can be hard to remedy'

Issues surrounding data quality can be difficult for many businesses to remedy, but it is an area that can deliver significant productivity and cost improvements if done well, it has been claimed.

Lance Mercereau, director of marketing and public relations at Rosslyn Analytics, said it is often difficult to ascertain where data corruption comes from and if it is a problem with processes, then this can be even more difficult to determine.

He commented: "If you have got a process or a system in place that one identifies it easily, but two, monitors who is actually putting the erroneous data into the system, then I think management is in a better position to remedy that."

According to research by Baseline Consulting, two-thirds of organisations have data governance in place, showing an improvement over earlier studies

However, 57 per cent of master data management implementations are enterprise-wide, while for data warehousing implementations this number is 75 per cent.