Image result for motHow you manage your data quality can have quite an impact on your organisation’s results.

If you think about taking your car for an MOT*, you’re taking it to be assessed against the criteria set out by the government to confirm it is legally roadworthy. It is a standard that you trust will ensure your safety in that vehicle.

Fingers crossed, it passes!

So, your vehicle passes the MOT inspection, but it also may come back with “advisories” on the document. Advisories are there as warnings for you to repair/replace something, (possibly your tyre treads are getting near to the legal limit, fluids are low, exhaust system has holes appearing, pipes are corroding).

If you left the advisories unattended until your next annual MOT, it may prove to be a costly mistake. No doubt they will have worsened, and possibly caused damage to other parts of the car as a result of poor maintenance, but worryingly it could also increase the risk of your safety. If you acted on them when they were identified, you would be maintaining the performance of your vehicle and not allow it to fall into a downward spiral of disrepair (potentially costing you a lot of time and money).

Generally, the condition of a car will generally only deteriorate over time, so the objective of maintenance is to monitor deterioration and initiate repairs/replacements before parts break or reach the point where they may be unsafe and therefore lead to an MOT test failure.

Moving on to data management, your challenge is more about ensuring that data quality improves (and certainly does not get worse). If you only monitor the current levels of data quality, then you would typically be trying to spot failures after they have happened, so would be unlikely to be able to deliver sustainable improvements in quality. In order to deliver sustainable improvements, you need to ensure that there is a suitable approach to data quality management in your organisation. ISO 8000 defines a useful framework for data quality management that can be adapted to suit the needs of most organisations.

We have used the ISO 8000 framework to develop a maturity assessment tool that allows us to quickly assess the maturity of your current approaches to Data Quality Management. The outputs will show:

  • The relative maturity of different data management aspects;
  • List detailed findings and conclusions; and
  • Provide suggestions for improvement actions ranging from short term pragmatic changes through to longer term strategic recommendations.

The benefits of an assessment are:

  • Provide an objective assessment of the maturity of approaches to data quality management;
  • Promote discussion about the relative priority of improving different aspects of data quality;
  • Potentially, provide a comparator to other organisations;
  • Provision of a detailed report illustrating the findings, assessed maturity, conclusions and recommendations for improvement; and
  • The assessment will provide a maturity score for when the assessment was undertaken, this will allow a repeat assessment to demonstrate how the approaches to data quality management have improved over time.

So, ask yourself, would your organisations approach to data management pass  a ‘data MOT test’ right now? Would you be ISO 8000 compliant?

To find out more, take a look at our Data Quality Maturity Assessment

*The MOT Test is an annual inspection in the UK of cars over 3 years old to ensure that it meets vehicle safety, is road worthy and has acceptable exhaust emissions.

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