Most small and medium-sized enterprises in SA are unaware of the importance of data quality within an organisation, or are under the false impression the current systems automatically ensure good data quality, says the BI Practice.
"Although most large enterprises are maturing, up to 95% of smaller organisations do not really know the quality of their data and assume it is good because of claims by enterprise software vendors that their applications include data quality control," says Denis Fourie, executive account manager at the BI Practice.
According to Fourie, most enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications merely ensure data is valid for particularly fields, but do not guarantee data is accurate, relevant, or complete.
Fourie says data quality is about far more than data format and every business should profile their data to find out exactly how effective their data quality controls really are. He adds that poor data quality often costs organisations a lot more than they realise.
"Anything below 100% data quality is unacceptable because poor data fed into any ERP system will reduce the accuracy of that system and have a negative impact on the organisation`s bottom line."
He says the Data Warehouse Institute estimates that businesses in the US lose $600 billion a year due to poor data quality in terms of unnecessary marketing expenses, undetected fraud and bad tactical and strategic decisions.
Estelle de Beer, practice manager at the BI Practice, says bad data quality is inevitable as private and public organisations begin to use data from an increasing number of different systems as well as migrate data from legacy systems and carry out consolidation projects.
"The only way to ensure ongoing data quality is to standardise data formats, implement data policies, and automate data cleansing processes to ensure data is complete, compliant, consistent, accurate and trusted," she says.
De Beer says information should be considered part of a company`s asset portfolio and data quality solutions should be seen as a means to increase the value of this portfolio and reduce business risk.
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