After years of neglect, data quality is slowly moving to the forefront of business technology as both a discipline and a thriving industry.
However, given data quality license revenues are estimated at a relatively minuscule $400 million for 2009 (compared to $17 billion for DBMS license revenues), data quality is not quite center stage yet.
Therefore, in this post I want to discuss the increase in awareness by organizations that is necessary to give data quality its due. I describe it as the three levels of Data Quality Enlightenment (DQE).
DQE Level 1 – Unaware
Organizations at Level 1 are blissfully unaware that slight discrepancies in their data create the potential for their business processes to fail.
Sometimes, the resulting failure is immediately visible. Other times, it eventually becomes visible in a downstream application or after some period of time has passed. Either way, the organization feels the impact of the failure as increased costs or decreased revenue, or both.
Upon finally recognizing the root cause of the problem to be data quality, organizations typically progresses to Level 2.
DQE Level 2 – Aware
Organizations at Level 2 have come to realize that they must implement data quality measures to avoid the costs of “bad data.”
The logic usually goes like this – if data is not perfect our business processes can fail, therefore we must make sure that our data is always perfect. What wonderfully flawed logic!
No matter how hard an organization tries, their data can never be perfect. Why? Because by its nature, the data, and access to it, changes over time.
Existing records are updated. New records are created. Both of these actions can be performed by existing or new people and by existing or new systems.
With the additional reality that these people and systems can be both internal and external to the organization, the complexity grows exponentially.
Therefore, is it realistic to expect that all data throughout the enterprise will always be kept perfect and standardized the exact same way?
Will humans accessing the data know and use the standard methods? Will humans always know the exact and correct data they want? Will multiple applications (within and between organizations) that need to share data use the same standards for data perfection?
Of course not. Simply put, perpetually perfect data is not possible. Don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise.
Yet despite these facts, the majority of the data quality industry is still focused on attempting to achieve data perfection.
The common belief is that the way to data Utopia is by writing rules to parse, standardize and match data. Of course the different rules have fancy technical names like “deterministic” and “probabilistic” but they all boil down to manual, static rules that need to be created, maintained, and updated in perpetuity.
The rules an organization has in place today for “perfect data” will have to change (update old rules and add new rules) as the data changes.
Unlike Level 1, where organizations quickly realize they must change and progress to Level 2, most organizations at Level 2 get stuck here and never progress to Level 3.
DQE Level 3 – Enlightened
Organizations reach Level 3 when they achieve enlightenment via the “eureka moment” when they realize that getting and keeping data perfect at all times and forever is, fundamentally, an insane idea.
These organizations then seek to find a better way.
That better way is to enable all enterprise applications to function correctly despite the fact that the underlying operational data they use is not perfect. And to do it without constantly updating and creating rules to parse, standardize, and match data.
The enlightened phase has only just begun with a select few organizations reaching Level 3.
Enlightenment is Inevitable
As is often the case, enlightenment comes from a simple yet powerful idea that breaks away from the constraints of conventional thought.
It’s only a matter of time before every enterprise application will no longer assume and require “perfect” data in order to function correctly.
When this finally happens, and it will, everyone will benefit.
