Your data is one of your most valuable assets. Poor data quality can lead to costly mistakes. It could result in damage to your reputation and have a negative impact on your business and revenue opportunities as well as have legal implications.
When considering the quality of your data the first question you need to ask yourself is – do I know where all my data is actually held? You may be surprised (or not) to learn that even corporations and large institutions have rogue spreadsheets and local databases saved on their users’ machines.
Some institutions have attempted to manage the various spreadsheets in a centralised Content Management system and imposed some access restrictions. However, even these have evolved and expanded overtime to become unmanageable and unfathomable data lists.
Before you can use a new system to manage and improve your data quality, you have to migrate your existing data into that new system. Ironically, in order to migrate your data into the application it has to meet all the validation criteria set to ensure its quality. Therefore, you will need to manipulate, cleanse and validate your information into a format that your new system will accept.
This can seem like a daunting task. However, there are some simple steps that you can follow that will help you to break down this task into manageable stages.
