This post is one of a series dealing with common Enterprise Wide Data Governance Issues. Assess the status of this issue in your Enterprise by clicking here: Data Governance Issue Assessment Process
Causes:
- Front-end staff are put under pressure to ‘sell business’ and sort out details later.
- Front-end staff have no incentive to enter high-quality data.
- Front-end staff are unaware of the downstream impact of poor data.
- Little realisation on the part of front-end staff that data entered at account opening may be re-used repeatedly for 30+years.
- Front-end systems may lack data validation software.
- Front-end systems may not enforce business rules between related fields.
- Reluctance to add data validation to legacy Front-end systems
Impact:
- Incomplete or poor quality ‘informational’ or ‘Master data’ captured at data entry.
- Risk that the enterprise and/or individual business units will fail to comply with regulatory requirements (e.g. the requirement to ‘Know your customer’).
Solution:
Agree and implement the following policies:
- Data owners must define the business rules to be applied to each data item at data entry time.
- Data owners must agree Data Quality requirements with the end users of the data, and the owners of the data entry processes.
- Data owners must agreee Data Quality Service Level Agreements with the end users of the data, and the owners of the data entry processes.
- Data Quality measurement must be implemented at each point of data entry to measure the quality of data being entered, and support the implementation of data quality Service Level Agreements.
- Front-end staff must be educated on the importance of data quality
- Front-end staff must be supported in taking the time and effort to “get it right first time”
Your experience:
Have you faced the above issue in your organisation, or while working with clients? What did you do to resolve it? Please share your experience by posting a comment – Thank you – Ken.