Fix Data: How System Integrators Can Ensure Project Success
One of the most important lessons learned from our experience prior to DvSum is that data quality is critical to the success of any IT or System project. In fact, research shows bad data is the #1 reason projects are delayed, go over budget, and fail to deliver value. Testing data quality on a project goes well beyond missing or duplicate data and valid formats. To ensure the right data involves model compliance, completeness, data consistency, data integrity, issues related to redundancy, data accuracy, timeliness, and more.
System Integrators struggle to meet all the data requirements of a project, which is why automated the complete range of data testing is the missing weapon in the arsenal to ensure project success.
The situation on the Ground – The Importance of Data Quality in Projects
Quality data is not only critical for system outputs, it directly impacts the quality of solution and integration design, and user-acceptance testing for the projects. Without access to quality data during the build phase, data conversions and integration cannot be developed and tested for all the use-cases. Without access to good quality data, functional and user-acceptance testing is incomplete and will likely cause a project to be delayed.
Strategy – Systematic Automated Data Quality Testing
Automating data quality testing gives the SI vendor an edge and scalability on projects. It helps to identify gaps in the data sooner than later and allows the project team to focus on enabling the business process and delivering value, rather than reconciling data. The validation rules only need to be defined once, and then can be repeated rapidly for more iterations, resulting in higher data and solution readiness for go-live. The project also realizes bottom-line cost savings from reduced labor for integration testing and also mitigates risk of budget overruns due to project delays.
Your Data Quality Weapon
To deal with these issues DvSum has developed DataPARC, a versatile cloud-based tool that System Integrators’ can use during projects to make data readiness leverage rather than dependency. Project teams can explore and understand data, run audits to check and fix the data, measure quality, set milestones, assign action items, and drive compliance required to deliver a successful project.
Understanding Data by Profiling
With DvSum’s Data Profiling, project teams can understand and interpret the structure and contents of data by performing self-diagnostics.
- What are the ranges of values?
- Are you missing any values?
- What are the different characteristics or attributes of the data?
- What is the pattern of data?
- Identify data proliferation and duplication
- Database design suggestions
Measure Data Readiness with Audits
Data auditing tools, not only can project teams measure the quality of data, but also integrity, completeness, timeliness, and accuracy.
So you can answer questions such as:
- Are data values what they should be?
- Is Data within expected tolerance or range?
- Is the overall volume in the expected range?
- Is data consistent between one system and another?
To make sure the data is ready, you can also set milestones and data quality targets and track them during the project to drive ownership and ensure you’re on track for success.
Automated Data Testing & Beyond
Most data quality tools stop at the automated execution of validation rules. DvSum takes it much further and not only automates the execution of business rules but also analyzes and fixes the data. The solution enables you to drill-down into the data and does an initial analysis to identify exceptions and potential fixes, which can then be set to auto-cleanse. With automatic archiving, you can also see the historical trend of the data and also enable run-to-run variance analysis.
Automated testing of data quality and integrity is the missing weapon in a system integrator arsenal. We’ve implemented it in the cloud because we know how powerful it is to enable quick setup and scalability on a project.
To see what DvSum can do for your project, contact us for a demo and free Pilot to get started.
