Developing A Business Case and A Data Quality Road Map

This chapter demonstrates how the characterization of risks associated with ignoring data quality problems can be presented to senior management as an opportunity for developing competitive advantage. It also reviews the considerations for staffing and planning that can be compiled into a tactical road map for deploying a data quality strategy. The process of building a business case to justify both the technology and the organizational infrastructure necessary to ensure a successful program requires additional research and documentation, namely: quantification of identified financial impacts, assessment of the actual financial impacts, determination of the source of the actual root causes in the information processing that are correlated to those impacts, diagnosis of the root cause of the process failure, determination of potential remediation approaches, the costs to remediate those process failures, and a way to prioritize and plan the solutions of those problems. All of this information can be accumulated into a pair of templates: one for impact analysis and the other for estimating the opportunity for value improvement or creation. In particular, the impact template is used to document the problems, issues, business impacts, and quantifiers. Together, all this information enables the practitioner to estimate a quantified yearly incurred impact attributable to poor data quality.