Corporate data quality management in context

Abstract

Presently, we are well aware that poor quality data is costing large amounts of money to corporations all over the world. Nevertheless, little research has been done about the way Organizations are dealing with data quality management and the strategies they are using. This work aims to find some answers to the following questions: which business drivers motivate the organizations to engage in a data quality management initiative?, how do they implement data quality management? and which objectives have been achieved, so far? Due to the kind of research questions involved, a decision was made to adopt the use of multiple exploratory case studies as research strategy [32]. The case studies were developed in a telecommunications company (MyTelecom), a public bank (PublicBank) and in the central bank (CentralBank) of one European Union Country. The results show that the main drivers to data quality (DQ) initiatives were the reduction in non quality costs, risk management, mergers, and the improvement of the company’s image among its customers, those aspects being in line with literature [7, 8, 20]. The commercial corporations (MyTelecom and PublicBank) began their DQ projects with customer data, this being in accordance with literature [18], while CentralBank, which mainly works with analytical systems, began with data source metadata characterization and reuse. None of the organizations uses a formal DQ methodology, but they are using tools for data profiling, standardization and cleaning. PublicBank and CentralBank are working towards a Corporate Data Policy, aligned with their Business Policy, which is not the case of MyTelecom. The findings enabled us to prepare a first draft of a “Data Governance strategic impact grid”, adapted from Nolan& MacFarlan IT Governance strategic impact grid [17], this framework needing further empirical support.