As I mentioned earlier, In 2005, I was fortunate enough to get the experience of designing a data quality solution for a very large organization from the ground up. This is the frame of reference that I am using for this series.

Imagine this scenario:

Due to forces outside their control (litigation, regulation, or just changes in the operating environment) the leadership team needs to personally vouch for the integrity of the data across all systems for your organization. They need to be able to accurately report the current state of information quality, where it going and where it has been. If a full accounting can’t be determined immediately, then they need to be able to provide as much quality information as possible now, and provide a realistic (but short) timeline for universal reporting. This needs to be accomplished with minimal head count and without affecting current operations.

Could your organization do this now? Does it want to? For a lot of organizations, this is a doomsday scenario, something that makes people clamp both hands over their ears, sing la-la-la-la-la, and think happy thoughts until it all goes away. However, every day we see things in the news where information quality problems cause big, thorny issues for otherwise well meaning organizations. We have seen Congress get involved with financial information (through Sarbanes-Oxley), medical information (with HIPPA), and governmental oversight (through the Data Quality Act). This isn’t a crazy request.

I have been personally involved in dealing with issues like this, where sudden, critical issues around information quality and security caused our organization to completely change how an organization operates. I have seen it from both sides of the coin, working both in management and in technology. I can tell you that dealing with these issues isn’t pretty, or cheap. However, they are do-able, and the more proactive you are the easier it is to deal with unforeseen circumstances.

More to come …

technorati tags: iinformation quality, data quality, SOX, compliance, HIPPA, data

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 14th, 2006 at 11:08 am and is filed under Systems Integration, Information Quality, People. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.