11 - Data Quality Assessment

Abstract

This chapter discusses a combination top–down and bottom–up approach for assessment to quickly generate a report documenting potential data quality issues. The resulting report describes and prioritizes clearly identified data quality issues, recommendations for remediation, and suggestions for instituting data quality inspection and control for data quality monitoring. The chapter helps identify high visibility data issues and characterize the business impacts incurred by those issues. At the same time, opportunities for improvement can be identified, providing an objective assessment of critical data, determine whether the levels of data quality are sufficient to meet business expectations, and, if not, evaluate the value proposition and feasibility of data quality improvement. This process essentially employs data profiling techniques to review data, identify potential anomalies, contribute to the specification of data quality dimensions and corresponding metrics, and recommend operational processes for data quality inspection. It involves five steps: plan for data quality assessment, evaluate business process, prepare for data profiling, profile and analyze, and synthesize results.