Topic: Maintaining & leveraging data quality – establishing processes to continuously measure and maintain data quality and leveraging the enhanced data to generate new business opportunities.

The case history is being presented by Jane Wilson, Director, IT Asia Pacific, Dun and Bradstreet (D&B).

Session Description

The IT industry has long understood the term garbage in: garbage out. Yet without an effective approach to maintaining data quality the value of the data, and IT itself, will be undermined. In 2005 Jane Wilson was recruited by the CEO at D&B Australasia to examine ways the company could more effectively exploit its data resources. With the company held by private equity there was an intense focus on increasing the value of the business.

Jane found that her task was seriously impeded by problems with maintaining the quality of the company’s data. Jane impressed on the business the need to manage its data as a corporate resource. This entailed establishing custodianship for data; recognising the need to take a data lifecycle management approach; re-architecting the IT environment to drive data consistency; embedding data quality  as a requirement in every business case and implementing data quality KPIs in executive performance metrics. The result has seen the establishment of new data driven products for the business and sizeable growth in company value.

In this briefing Jane will outline the journey she has undertaken, and the challenges she has faced, over the last six years. This involved a data discovery process that helped D&B’s executive better understand where its data was collected, how it was applied and where it was deficient. Jane will talk about how she improved the data quality and how she ensures it is maintained as an ongoing process. This has entailed getting a better understanding of the lifecycle of data to recognise how frequently it needs to be updated and cleansed. A key challenge has been getting the business to appreciate that data is a corporate asset that needs ongoing management. She will explain how the use of data quality KPIs in D&B’sbalanced scorecard has helped facilitate this. Another area that Jane will address is how a transactional environment, which D&B has increasingly become, has added to her challenges and made ongoing data quality management an even more pressing priority. Finally, she will talk about why she believes investments in Business Intelligence, data warehouses and master data management are all doomed to failure without strong data quality disciplines.

$contact_account_name may send 3 delegates to this session. The meeting will actively encourage discussion and debate on the approach taken by D&B. As such, your representatives should come prepared to discuss and debate their experiences, views or concerns with establishing and maintaining effective data quality such as: how can you make this an ongoing task rather than a spasmodic housekeeping activity; how do you get executive ownership of data quality; why not use a data warehouse to filter the data rather than trying to cleanse transactional information; how do you get agreement on data definitions between different business units with different objectives and how can you cost-justify the ongoing investment needed to maintain consistent data quality standards. Moreover, if you have any other specific issues on this subject that you want the meeting to discuss please tell me them in an email when you register.

For catering and seating purposes we need to know who will be attending by Friday March 2nd. As such, can you please let us know whether your organisation is intending to send representatives to this session, and, if so, who they are, by using this online registration form. If your organisation will not be represented at the session can you also use this link to advise us?

Sincerely

Peter Hind 
Director 
Coalface Community