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Business Intelligence: Poor Data Quality Threatens Analytics
Garbage in, Garbage out (GIGO). It’s a simple truth that has important implications in the world of business intelligence. While Business Intelligence tools can create beautiful and compelling dashboards and graphics, if the data that the tools rely on is of poor quality, their results are meaningless, or at least potentially badly flawed.
Data cleansing and data quality are important in order to ensure quality results from business intelligence analytics. A report from Experian QAS finds that as many as 90 percent of organizations think that the data they are managing is of poor quality, and the reason why organizations can’t do better is because they rely too much on human input and have limited resources to direct towards improving the situation.
Another survey by Informatica Corporation came to a similar conclusion as the Experian report. It found that 83 percent of organizations did not have confidence in the accuracy of their data.
Rick Sherman, Founder of Athena IT solutions, said that “dirty data can really muddy up a company’s attempt at real-time disclosure and puts the chief financial officer at high risk when signing off on financial reports and even press releases based on incorrect information.”
Many companies have not even considered that data, like any almost any other product, has a shelf life. The Experian survey found that a quarter of organization have never even thought to examine the quality of their data. But many organization realize there is a problem, but they yjust don’t have the time or resources to confront it.
Thomas Schutz, Senior Vice President at Experian, said that “the first step in dealing with any issue is admitting there is a problem, which we see most businesses doing based on the survey results. Now the question becomes whether business will act on the problem, and actually improve data management systems to correct information before it enters business processes, rather than using manually correcting bad data on the back end. We are starting to see more businesses move to these type of systems.”
