5.7 Closing Remarks

This has been a light trip through the process of developing, solving, and measuring the effectiveness of issues that come from data quality processes. The emphasis has been on how issues are created and managed that originate from data inaccuracy discoveries.

This treatment should cement the thought that data quality improvements are long-term and very public tasks. The data quality assurance group cannot function in isolation. The other departments engaged in the data acquisition, management, and use activities are very integral parts of the process and need to be included in the process at all steps. They also need to accept the goal of better-quality data and to welcome efforts rather than resist them.

Issues can have a very long life. I suspect that some of them can live forever. This leads to the need for formal treatment of them as business objects. It also calls for issues to be very accessible in their own database.

Issue resolutions are often considered interruptive to the normal flow of work through departments that develop and deploy information technology. They will tend to get sidetracked easily if not monitored and placed in front of management on a regular basis.

These activities need to become the normal flow of work. Monitoring data quality and making corrections to improve it should not be considered a nuisance, but should be considered a regular part of information systems operations. This chapter again highlights the need to coordinate the activities of data quality assurance with the complete information systems agenda.

I am not aware of any issues management software that has been developed specifically for data quality issues. The best available software is standard project management software, of which there are many flavors available. Most organizations are already using one or more of these packages. It would be helpful if some vendor addressed this topic specifically as it relates to data quality assurance.

Issues management would make an excellent XML database application. The different phases and types of information are easy to generate standard tags for. Access to information over the Internet would be facilitated through this approach. This is important, considering the wide range of people who need to get involved in issues at one point or another.