So what the heck is Data-Quality?
Let’s imagine you are Joe!
Joe is the CIO of a large enterprise that is planning to invest in Big Data, Business Intelligence, and Analytics!
Joe is thrilled!!
They sign up for a top BI solution and their technical team gets on with pulling off a mammoth data-migration and transformation task to migrate to a more stable and scalable infrastructure, hoping it would catapult their business to new heights!
… and after weeks of relentless endeavor, they eventually pull it off! It’s a day to celebrate!
Joe now sits comfortably in his office room with all the BI powered analytics, visualizations & decision support systems at his disposal!
The new BI system runs like a charm, presenting heaps of “Actionable” data in beautiful heat-maps, graphs, and visualizations which not only Joe, but even his techno-functional management team members can make sense of.
But wait! There’s a glitch!
Somehow, the visualizations have lately been showing trends of an increased average customer churn rate, even though their accounts and billing department have been babbling profits!
Also, lately, their support team has been seeing a lot of customers complaining about their accounts being locked out.
Joe and his team now get worried!
They get their Database team to run SQL reports on the database, just to reconcile the findings of the BI system with the records of receivables as presented by their accounting department.
It’s a negative!
SQL Reports do not show a loss! This makes Joe and his team even more worried!
They now run a company-wide audit to identify the cause of this glitch, including calling up the engineers from their new software vendor to support their efforts.
After weeks of excruciating “discovery” process, and hundreds of man-horseman hours of investment and thousands of $$ paid to their ERP vendor’s support staff, they finally find the culprit!
It is an issue with DATA-QUALITY!?
During their recent data-migration process, one of the SQL engineers in charge of the ETL process made a wrong assumption about a data field which led to the inclusion of bad/factually incorrect data into their existing system.
This led to their existing customers’ accounts being disabled if their billing address saved in the database could not be verified using the new ERP provider’s AVS (Address Verification System). Their old ERP solution, on the contrary, offered a slightly lax implementation allowing customers to make a purchase even with an unverified address.
Result!
Whenever a customer with an outdated billing address details tried logging in to their e-store, the new ERP system at the back-end would lock them out leading to the BI tool displaying loss of customer accounts as increased customer churn rate. Since the lock-out would happen after the customer made a purchase, the accounts and billing department received no failed transaction notification and hence the glitch!
Fortunately for Joe, uncovering and eventually fixing this issue did not take them much time, and so they could prevent what could have been a major loss in revenue and reputation to their organization.
But here’s a lesson from this instance!
If your company is just off a recent data-transformation or migration process, especially in a BI implementation, it is worth testing a Data-Quality Management tool to ensure such a glitch does not invade your profitability metrics!
Not to mention that your BI tools can only show you correct trends and visualizations if and only if the underlying data is semantically intact from every perspective!
Joe was lucky to have found out the glitch just in time, but it may not always be the case with so many more organizations planning to invest in BI! Hopefully, now you know why your BI tools just won’t do without a solid Data Quality governance framework in place?
So why not make your enterprise “BI Ready” with a robust Data-Quality Management solution in place beforehand?
There’s a probability, you might be thinking…
“But our organization has undergone no Data Transformation/Migration or ETL process lately and we don’t plan to invest in BI in the near foreseeable future either. ”
Ok, Fine!
But you still need a Data-Quality framework in your organization… and here’s why!
Apart from the instance explained above, here are some other ways a fault in the authenticity of your existing data (i.e. Data-Quality) can creep in:-
- A manual data-entry process gone wrong because of human error.
- Data redundancy i.e. Mixed entries by multiple users or Multiple versions of the data (originating from different sources) not being backed up by a centralized and enterprise-wide data-consolidation process.
- Systems Errors/Software Updates.
- Data Expiry (data becoming obsolete over time).
- Inadequate testing and software (Whitebox/Blackbox) quality checks.
… and that’s where an elite enterprise Data-Quality Management solution such as DvSum Enterprise Data Quality Tool comes into the picture.
DvSum’s Enterprise Data Quality Tool helps you achieve the above-mentioned objectives by offering a set of features including but not limited to:-
- Defining and running rules to manage Data Completeness, Validity, Uniqueness, Timeliness, Integrity, Aggregate Data Validation (e.g. SQL functions like Count of total records, Sum of key metrics, etc).
- Comparing data across multiple source systems simultaneously to facilitate real-time access to a single version of the truth across all your organizations’ functions (Master Data Management/Sync)
- Data reconciliation or matching master or transactional documents across multiple systems field by field so that your business doesn’t face glitches like the one faced by Joe’s organization.
- Supply Chain Network Completeness Rules if you run a supply chain business or supply chain is one of the key functions of your organization.
In a nutshell, Data-Quality Governance in today’s Big-Data and BI operated business world is not just an option you can afford to sideline, but an enterprise-wide responsibility that must be shouldered by all the departments of an organization equally, esp. if you plan to maximize your return on investment in a BI solution. Do you want our experts to show you the benefits of having a “Data-Quality Management” framework in place for your biz? Call us out now!
