Data quality: a rising e-business concern

Data quality has become a business-critical issue because it can make or break the databases and data warehouses that drive e-business. Garbage in, garbage out is not new; it started to become more important because of data warehouses and data marts as well as the Web. In recent InformationWeek surveys, IT professionals have consistently ranked data quality tasks as the leading IT challenge in the post-Y2K remediation era. What's also new is that data quality issues aren't limited to individual erroneous records: they now include how applications associate various pieces of data, and how users use or interpret data. As new data usage revealed the need to ensure data consistency throughout the enterprise, new tools have emerged to help IT reconcile data inconsistencies. Not all professionals are confident off-the-shelf solutions can flexibly meet their needs, but vendors argue that automating tasks allows quicker, cost-effective project and application deployment.