Abstract:
It is now assumed that poor quality data is costing
large amounts of money to corporations all over the world.
Although research on methods and techniques for data quality
assessment and improvement have begun in the early nineties of
the past century and being currently abundant and innovative, it
is noted that the academic and professional communities
virtually have no dialogue, which turns out to be harmful to both
of them. The challenge of promoting the relevance in information
systems research, without compromising the necessary rigor, is
still present in the various disciplines of information systems
scientific area [1,2], including the data quality one.
In this paper we present “data as a corporate asset” as a business
philosophy, and a framework for the concepts related to that
philosophy, derived from the academic and professional
literature. According to this framework, we present, analyze and
discuss a single explanatory case study, developed in a fixed and
mobile telecommunications company, operating in one of the
European Union Countries. The results show that, in the absence
of data stewardship roles, data quality problems become more of
an "IT problem" than typically is considered in the literature,
owing to Requirements Analysis Teams of the IS Development
Units, to become a “quality negotiator” between the various
stakeholders. Other findings are their bottom-up approach to
data quality management, their biggest focus on motivating
employees through innovative forms of communication, which
appears to be a critical success factor1 (CSF) for data quality
management, as well as the importance of a data quality
champion [3] leadership.