What It Takes to Get Businesses Concerned About Data Quality ...

Five Tips for Easier Data Governance

Five steps you can take to ease the trauma of starting data governance.

Jim Harris is data quality consultant and expert who fights the good fight of champion data quality daily on his OCDQ blog and OCDQ Radio podcast. Harris explains to IT Business Edge's Loraine Lawson why it's so hard to convince companies to be proactive about data quality and the challenges of data governance.

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Lawson: You focus more on the strategic value of data quality. What?s it going to take to get organizations to evolve in their understanding of data quality?

Harris: It?s very rare that anyone will talk about data quality in isolation. Nowadays people will talk about data quality within the context of master data management or data governance or in relation to business intelligence or analytics programs.

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The word ?data? is not as esoteric as it used to be. It used to be a time where only computer geeks like me would use the word data. Now people buy cell phones and wonder what their data plan is.

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The concept of data has shifted tremendously, because it?s entered the mainstream because more and more of our world has become directly digitized, so more and more of our world is directly data and any Internet and mobility have played a huge part of this.

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Some people in the data quality profession have gotten excited about this and said, ?Oh, OK, well now that data is everywhere, more and more people know what data is and it?s not a weird, geeky concept anymore, that means everyone is going to care about data quality now, right??

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No. The problem that happens is we cross the threshold from no one noticed it to everyone notices it, but when everyone notices it, nobody notices it, because it just blends into the background.

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The example that I always use is music. Music is a form of data and the early days of any type of data delivery to the world, there needed to be a physical thing that brought that data to you. In the early days, that used to be a vinyl record. Then we had audio cassettes, then we had CDs, then we had MP3 files and other forms of digital file formats.

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The objects that we used to receive that data were record players or CD players or iPods or other MP3 players. Nowadays we have things like Pandora and Iheartradio, which are on-demand streaming music and the only physical thing we?re using to connect is an Internet connection. We don?t actually have to own the music.

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