The Organizational Data Quality Program

It is necessary to plan the approach for assembling a data quality management program and instituting the practices that will lead to improvement once it has been determined that poor data quality has a negative impact on the ways the business operates. That plan must consider: the processes that need to be instituted, the participants that will execute those processes and their roles and responsibilities, and the tools that will be used to support the processes. Instituting a practical data quality management program involves people, process, and technology to succeed. This chapter provides an overview of these items. A discussion of data quality improvement cycle, followed by an overview of data quality processes are given in the chapter. The stakeholders and participant roles are then reviewed. Tools and techniques that support the data quality processes are elaborated. Instituting a data quality management program means more than just purchasing data cleansing tools or starting a data governance board. An iterative cycle of assessment, planning, execution, and performance management for data quality requires repeatable processes that join people with the right sets of skills with the most appropriate tools.