Tips for Improving Data Quality

With access to high quality data, your organization can make faster and better decisions. Here are four tips to improving the quality of your data repository.

Perform a Data Quality Assessment

Analyze the current state of your data. Incomplete records, duplicates or data entry errors decrease the value of your data repository. Identifying the data quality issues in your current data repository provides information to guide improvements with source systems and business processes. TEC uses leading tools such as Informatica and DataStage to quickly identify errors, inconsistencies, duplicates or missing fields.

Prioritize Data Quality Efforts

Review the data quality issues and prioritize the data quality efforts based on the changes that will have the biggest impact.  TEC combines consulting and technical expertise to help clients prioritize efforts and develop metrics to measure the quality improvement efforts.

Build a Data Quality Staging Area

Use a staging area to validate records before passing them into your reporting environment. Records that fail to meet the quality criteria should be maintained in a format to analysis and updates if applicable.   TEC has experience building data quality staging areas that quickly identify and categorize data quality issues based on business rules.

Continuously Monitor Data Quality

Once your organization has improved the high priority data quality issues, it is important to continuously monitor and refine the data quality efforts. TEC integrates its data quality monitoring using business intelligence tools such as MicroStrategy and Cognos to alert data stewards to quality issues as soon as possible. Addressing these issues when identified will save effort to fix down the road.

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