Data is one of a business’ most important assets. Having high quality data is especially important when it comes to streamlining, and it is also incorporated into making major business decisions. Therefore, businesses should be encouraged to have the highest quality data available at their disposal and engage in practices that will help keep it high. Here are some of the strategies that businesses should implement in order to have high data quality.
Appoint Data Stewards
These are special roles that are reserved specifically to define who will be the actual owners of the quality of data. Data stewards are those who have direct control over the data’s integrity. These stewards need to be selected form within the actual business units themselves, because they will already have a better understanding of how the data can be translated into the immediate needs for the business.
With this method, there will be an increased chance that a business can generate good quality data within the scope of normal business practices.
Have a Firewall
Since data is a financial asset, there needs to be important checks to ensure that the data being entered is of high quality. Therefore, in order to circumvent the risk of the data losing some of its accuracy, a firewall can act as a good defense. Data that can’t be used have a tendency to travel quickly and corrupt many data sources.
If there is any trace of corrupt data, it will be detected automatically by the firewall and be diverted back to the original source.
Have a Data Governance Board
Forming a data governance board will expedite the process in ensuring that a business always has access to high quality data. What makes a data governance board important is that they have representations from all important business functions and IT. The responsibility of this board entails enforcing policies of data quality across the organization.
This board should also meet on a regular basis to describe specific data goals, drive measurements, define new data targets and analyze the status of the current quality of data in different business units.
Educate Your Organization
You will be very hard pressed to find an employee that is not directly or indirectly involved in data management these days. In one way or another, every member of an organization is involved within data management.
For example, you have administrative assistants who enter manual data in different books. There is IT personnel who make important decisions about which data logs have to be kept. There are also marketer designers that collect data about customers automatically.
It is quite clear that all of these people are involved in data quality, and as such, they need to be educated on the basics of maintaining high quality data and understand the importance of avoiding errors and inconsistencies.
As you can see, having high quality data for a business to use is extremely important, and there are specific practices that businesses need to practice in order to ensure that it remains that way. Follow these steps, and your business will have just that