In “They Need It All”, Frank Dravis brings up an interesting point about information quality and scale.

A common debate in project management circles is how much data quality functionality is needed by “lower end” users. In this case, we define a low-end user based on data volumes. More specifically, a person who works for a firm with a million or fewer records that need to be processed.

Do smaller organizations need data quality less? Dravis doesn’t think so …

It is a misperception that just because a firm has a relatively small data set they have small processing requirements. Oh to the contrary. It is true the processing (volume) demands and the value derived through cleansing software is dramatically different between a Fortune Five global enterprise, and a small direct marketing firm, but the sophistication of what they need to do to the data is the same.

Exactamundo! If smaller organizations need the same level of data sophistication for less data, then they actually need greater overall information quality (at least when measured on by volume). If your decision making ability is impaired when 10% of your data is invalid, it is a lot easier to get there if you are using 10 records compared to 10 million.

The question then becomes, how do you serve this market hmmmmmmmmmm ….

technorati tags:information quality, data quality, small business

This entry was posted on Friday, June 9th, 2006 at 11:24 am and is filed under Information Architecture, Information Quality, Understanding. 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.