Introduction

Data collection is playing a vital role in determining competitive benefit for trade and other
ventures and has been well recognized as a business dictum. Whoever holds significant
information today can influence that data for success in terms of both production and
profitability.
The role of information in creating competitive advantage for businesses and other enterprises
has been well documented and is now a business axiom: whoever controls critical information
can leverage that knowledge for profitability
The leading and distinctive character of thriving data warehouse accomplishments is the
participation of the business community. It is imperative to keep the business elements
associated during the process to evade venomous consequences taking place in the business.
Enterprise Data Quality Management
Clean, useful and accurate data represents the added revenues that are realized when businesses
correctly model and track their customer relationships, product or service preferences. This
translate into huge savings in processing time, storage and mailing costs, in the confidence users
have in their own data, analysis and conclusions, but most importantly in the cost of contacting
customers and managing ongoing customer relationships
After some years of attempting to deal with the issue of data quality, a new discipline has
emerged within information architecture development to address the need for appropriately
managing data quality. This discipline, known as Enterprise Data Quality Management, (EDQM)
is intended to ensure the accuracy, timeliness, relevance and consistency of data throughout an
organization, or multiple business units within an organization, and therefore to ensure that
decisions are made on consistent and accurate information.
Data Stewardship
Data Stewardship has as its key aim as the management of the data assets of the enterprise in
order to develop their usability, ease of access and quality. Data stewards are valued by the end-
user because of their comprehensive knowledge about the business. It is understood that they do
not create Meta data and business rules that cannot be put into practice.
Data stewardship can have many functions to ensure quality data of an enterprise but some of the
most vital ones can be: -

 Adjudicating and Conversions of Set of laws

 Validation of the Data
 Contribution Towards The Business Metadata 
 Endorsing new users, 
 Sustaining the Population Using the Data 

The Challenge - Where and How to Begin

Just as Total Quality Management (TQM) required a level of pain within an organization to take
hold in the manufacturing sector, permanent data quality management occurs only when
companies feel sufficient pain because of poor data quality to be willing to build new practices to
solve the problems on an enterprise basis.
Effective EDQM approaches can significantly lower the costs of data cleansing.
Mistakes: The origin of mistakes in data is the simplest of problems to understand. These include
misspellings, typographical errors, out of range values or incorrect data types. While
typographical errors are difficult to correct, validation routines typically handle out of range
values or incorrect data types within applications.
Homonyms: The English language contains many words and abbreviations with identical
spellings that have multiple, and often unrelated or conflicting meanings, and relies on the
context of usage to determine the correct meaning. Improper interpretation of the context in
which the homonym was used can have a significant impact on data accuracy.
Lack of Standards: When data entry responsibilities are spread among different people and
business units, variations are bound to arise, as in the example below from information gathered
for inventory purposes.
Legal Entities: In many instances, the addition or subtraction of naming conventions may alter
the actual legal definition of a document.
Missing/Invisible Data: Often data that is present may contain the proper structure and values,
and in fact may appear to be correct but, data that has inadvertently been omitted causing
identification and linkage mechanisms to unknowingly "grow" a mountain of poor quality data.
Phantom Data: In many applications, phony data (e.g., the date 99/99/99) may be used to flag a
record or signify that there is no valid data for a particular field.

Data-cleansing - An Emerging Field

Proactive data quality initiatives start at the Data Entry phase. Data entry validation is the first
line of defense against bad data,
The advantages of checking data quality at the data entry stage are obvious: mistakes are nipped
in the bud, while the information is still fresh, thereby avoiding the need for downstream rework
that is often performed by someone unfamiliar with the source data.

Need for an Enterprise Approach

Managing data quality throughout an organization requires an enterprise approach. Such an
approach, which focuses on prevention and standards, as well as error correction, can provide
significant benefits to users, information technologists and, most importantly, to the bottom line.