Would you like to get the data in order within your organisation, but don’t know where to start? Has your organisation started data quality processes, but lacks a clear structure? Or do you have data issues, but don’t know how to solve them structurally? Then use a Data Quality Monitor.
To make your organisation truly data-driven, it is essential to centrally visualise and monitor data quality with a Data Quality Monitor. With a Data Quality Monitor, Data Stewards, department managers and higher management are informed about inconsistencies, connections and issues in their data. This allows timely adjustments to be made and keeps the organisation in control of their data quality.
The Data Quality Monitor
The Data Quality Monitor is a dashboard that allows you to see the current state of your data quality in a single overview. In addition, you can track the dynamics of your data over time. Data quality monitoring works on the basis of so-called Data Quality Trackers. These are tags that you assign to a data record with information about the data quality of a golden-record element (a field or combination of fields that uniquely identifies a relation). These tags are linked to 3 data quality principles:
Completeness
Is the data element filled?
Accuracy
Is the data element filled in the same way within each system with valid information by the customer or by a reliable source?
Timeliness
Has the data element been validated recently by the client or by another reliable source?
Tagging data informs the organisation about data dynamics. The advantage of the Data Quality Monitor: each stakeholder has its own view to gain insight into data for which it is responsible. In this, it is important that the dashboard provides overview for Management, shows priorities for Value Streams, and is action-oriented for employees correcting data.
Choosing the right tooling
To develop a Data Quality Monitor, there is a wide range of ‘dashboarding tools’ available. But what should you pay attention to when choosing the right tooling? First, it is important to consider usability, so that monitoring can be easily adapted and extended by different employees. In addition, in organisations with large customer bases, it is important that the ease of loading data sources is high to keep development lead times short.
An extra tip: ultimately, the dashboard is meant to be shared with the organisation. So be sure to also check the capabilities of the tooling to share the dashboard within the organisation. This way, all stakeholders can gain insight into their data quality.
In control of your data
Creating a Data Quality Monitor is an important step in the right direction. But this does not solve the data issues within your organisation. It is of course important that the dashboard is assigned to the right people. In addition, it should really be used as a starting point to improve data quality. How to do this successfully? With Data Stewards who place the Monitor with the right people, in-place processes to correct data with an assigned process owner and KPIs on data quality for Value Stream Managers. Then you start making serious steps to get in control of your data. And you can really be data-driven in your organisation.