Data Governance 101 — (part 4) Demand Data Quality

Thanks for coming back!

We have reviewed in part 1 of this series, why do we need Data Governance and in my part 2, how to start cataloging the data within the enterprise, how to document the supply chain of data in part 3. In this series, we are going to discuss much-misconstrued Data Quality!

Photo by Vignesh Moorthy on Unsplash

If you have been following my thought process, we have defined a domain model we wanted to govern, cataloged sources that provide such information, use it, enrich it, and publish the derivations of it to the rest of the enterprise.

Now, there is no use of this data, if there are quality issues. How do you define quality? We are going to borrow the definition from our good friends at EDM Council, good quality data is fit-for-purpose for the business. It simply meets the needs of defined business processes and outcomes.

So, working backwards we have to define what good quality data means. If you take the Customer domain, for example, for someone in sales and marketing who communicate constantly with customers, they need Contact preferences, relationship details, so they could offer new products and services we could offer constitutes “fit for purpose”. Someone in shipping, they need to know if the mailing address is correct and up to date. For someone in compliance, they need to know the…