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Blog Post

November 25, 2016

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Clean up your data!

By John Desborough

For organizations looking to make sense of their data, the first step is to ensure your data is managed well – that your data is consistent, accurate and that rules are in force to keep users from doing anything to undermine the integrity of your data. But whether you’re trying to ensure data quality going forward or clean up a whole history of sloppy data, the choices in the marketplace can be bewildering.

Gartner reports  businesses and governments invested $1.4 billion in data quality tools in 2014 - to see the report click here. It projects the market will top $2.1 billion by 2017 and breaks down the types of tools into eight categories:

  • Generalized cleansing. Modification of data values to meet domain restrictions, integrity constraints or other business rules
  • Data profiling and data quality measurement. Analysis to capture metadata that can help to identify data quality issues
  • Parsing and standardization. Decomposing text fields into component parts and formatting values into consistent layouts
  • Matching. Identifying, linking or merging related entries within or across datasets
  • Monitoring. Imposing controls to ensure data conforms to business rules that define data quality for an organization
  • Issue resolution and workflow. Identifying, quarantining and resolving data quality issues using processes and interfaces that enable collaboration with key roles, such as data stewards
  • Enrichment. Enhancing the value of internally held data by appending related attributes from external sources (such as mapping or location data)

Whether you are looking to clean up existing data or determine a way forward, especially if you are looking to shift into more analytics than traditional Business Intelligence, A Hundred Answers can help. We work with our clients to develop and execute strategies to assess data quality and clean up legacy data, as well as to position themselves for analytics and shifting to becoming a fully digital business.

 

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John Desborough is a Director, Consulting and Technology Solutions at MNP. He is an accomplished business solutions program manager and business transformation architect with 30+ years in the information and technology consulting domain. John has extensive background in information management and governance with both public and private sector clients on a global scale. Drop John a line to discuss this topic in more detail: [email protected] .