Initiating a data quality initiative could be a daunting task. It has the potential to quickly grow exponentially complex due to its specific nature and requirements. We are well aware about this risk, therefore we created an approach that addresses this…fact of life.
Introducing the House of Data Quality
To ensure data quality activities are successful, a skillful blend between clever technology and people management is required. Tools alone cannot guarantee data quality. Asking people to spend extra of their precious time would also not lead to sustainable success. Therefore, we developed our “House of Data Quality”, approach that help us combine people expertise and technology to achieve data of highest quality that delivers on the business purpose.
Our tooling foundation
The companies could have massive amount of data. Therefore a good level of automation is certainly required to perform an effective and efficient data quality assessment. Another complication is that the data could be vastly different even within the same company or even department, residing in multiple systems, each with its specific characteristics. This is the reason we design the tools we use to deliver three key requirements: (1) Ability to handle any data from any system or source. To perform an assessment we ensure that we can, irrespective of the data, bring it to our assessment algorithms in the most convenient and compliant way possible; (2) We have a suite of ever-growing off-the-shelf data quality checks, which immediately deliver insight about the data it is fed to our algorithms; (3) We have the ability to efficiently expand the required checks to ensure that the data is assessed from all possible angles. In short, our tooling foundation gives us the ability for fast and efficient assessment for data quality issues on any type of data.
Our consultancy approach
As we said, tooling alone, cannot guarantee success. Guiding the organization in the journey to a data of high quality requires people skills, eloquence, patience, discipline and tenacity. The task of the data quality manager or consultant is to guide multiple stakeholders who can be vastly different in skill, knowledge, expertise, expectation or motivation. Therefore, (1) we utilize a dedicated and tested runbook that we follow along the whole process, making sure that everyone is aligned and engaged in delivering highly efficient and valuable assessment for the quality of the data. Further, (2) we tailor the insights about the quality of the data we produce to each stakeholder group, providing the appropriate amount of awareness in order to trigger the right course of action that bring us to the ultimate goal.
You get data that fits your purpose
Both our tooling foundation and our consultancy approach gives us the confidence that we can lead our clients to a state where the data is of high quality and the business flourishes as a result. Further, it allows us to start each new project from an advanced position, building on our expertise and skill, to provide a significant head start in the path to clean data for our customers.