Introduction to Data Quality Management: Intrinsic, Realistic, Orrâ€™s Laws of Data Quality, TQM

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Lecture-21

Introduction to Data Quality Management (DQM)

Data is the "fuel" on which a Data Warehouse (DWH) runs. One of the main reasons for the

failure of DWH deployments is data quality or lack of it. Unfortunately the problems of data

quality are usually underestimated, leading to bad decisions, traumatic results and expensive

fixes.

There can be a whole course on data quality. The goal of this lecture is to expose the reader to the

data quality issues, and to motivate them to understand more about quality management and

quality control. This will enable the reader to relate quality management to the DWH, because

usually quality control relates to manufacturing than Data Warehousing.

Consider the analogy of a car. You may have the best car, the bes t road conditions and the best

driver on the seat. But if the fuel is contaminated, or is not of the right octane, either the car will

not run, or will run, but not give the right performance.

What is Quality? Informally

Some things are better than others i.e. they are of higher quality. How much "better" is better?

Is the right item the best item to purchase? How about after the purchase?

What is quality of service? The bank example

The best way to look at data quality is to look at what quality means in the general marketplace

and then translate what quality means for data. As consumers, human beings consciously or

subconsciously judge the "quality" of things during their life -time. A conscious application of

quality measurement is when a person compares products in a store and chooses one of them as

the "right" product. "Right" here means selecting the product that best meets his/her overall

needs. Note that the product bought may not necessarily have the best features in every category.

After pur chase, people establish quality based on a product-price comparison i.e. whether that

product for its price met their expectations as per its intended use?

What is Quality? Formally

Quality is conformance to requirements"

P. Crosby, "Quality is Free" 1979

Degree of excellence"

Webster's Third New International Dictionary

Conformance to requirements does not imply simply conformation to written specifications.

Customers' requirements may be formal and written, or informal mental expectations of meeting

their purpose or satisfying their needs.

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If a product meets formally defined "requirement specifications," yet fails to be a quality product

from the customers' pe rspective, this means the requirements were defective.

If an application is designed and built to meet the functional requirements signed off by the

business sponsors, and during formal testing the business sponsors reject the application as not

meeting their needs, what does that mean? Either the requirements specification or the analysis

and design process is defective.

What is Quality? Examples from Auto Industry

Quality means meeting customer's needs, not necessarily exceeding them.

Quality means improving things customers care about, because that makes their lives easier and

more comfortable.

Why example from auto-industry?

The luxury automobile producer Rolls Royce went bankrupt in the early 1980s. Analysis revealed

that, among other things , Rolls Royce was improving components that the luxury automobile

customers felt were irrelevant and polishing parts they did not care about. This drove the price

beyond what the luxury automobile customer felt was value for their money.

On the other ha nd, when Lexus decided to make its first major redesign of its highly rated L8 400

luxury automobile, company representatives asked for help from their existing customers. They

even visited the homes of a variety of L8 400 owners to observe home furnishings, what kind of

leather they had on their brief cases, and other minute details to get an idea of their customer's

subconscious expectations.

What is Data Quality?

What is Data?

All data is an abstraction of something real

Intrinsic Data Quality

Electronic reproduction of reality.

Realistic Data Quality

Degree of utility or value of data to business

Figure-21.1: What is Data Quality?

What is data?

Understand that all data is an abstraction or a representation of something real. Data is an

equivalent reproduction of something real. Figure 21.1 shows an employee data. Data in a

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database or data warehouse has no actual value; it only has potential value. Data has a real value

only when someone uses it to do something useful; for example, to send the utility bill to

customer at the correct address for timely payment, or to successfully go with the change in a

product based on the knowledge of customer likes/dislikes.

What Is Data Quality?

There are two significant definitions of dat a quality. One is its intrinsic quality, and the other is its

realistic quality. Intrinsic data quality is the correctness or accuracy of data. Realistic data quality

is the value that correct data has in supporting the work of the business or enterprise. Data that

does not help or enable the enterprise to accomplish its mission has no quality, no matter how

accurate it is.

Intrinsic Data Quality

Intrinsic data quality, simply stated, is data accuracy. Intrinsic data quality is the degree to which

data accurately reflects the real-world object that the data represents. If all facts that an

organization needs to know about an entity are accurate, that data has intrinsic quality -it is an

electronic reproduction of reality. Intrinsic data quality means that data is correct.

Realistic Data Quality

Realistic data quality is the degree of utility and value the data has to support the enterprise

processes that enable accomplishing enterprise objectives. Fundamentally, realistic data quality is

the degree of customer satisfaction generated by the knowledge workers who use it to do their

jobs. Realistic data quality is the degree to which data enables knowledge workers to meet

enterprise objectives efficiently and effectively.

Data Quality & Organizations

Intelligent Learning Organization:

High -quality information is an open, shared resource with value-adding processes.

The dysfunctional learning organization: Low -quality data is a proprietary resource with cost-

adding processes.

The intelligent learning organ ization is one that maximizes both its experience and its information

resources in the learning process. The intelligent learning organization shares information openly

across the enterprise in a way that maximizes the throughput of the entire organization . There are

no procedural walls, and the data users capture data and retrieve makes the business to grow.

In the Information Age, the dysfunctional learning organization is at a distinct disadvantage. The

term dysfunctional means "impaired or abnormal functioning."

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Orr's Laws of Data Quality

Law #1 - "Data that is not used cannot be correct!"

Law #2 - "Data quality is a function of its use, not its collection!"

Law #3 - "Data will be no better than its most stringent use!"

Law #4 - "Data quality problems increase with the age of the system!"

Law #5 "The less likely something is to occur, the more traumatic it will be when it happens!"

We will only know about the quality of the data (good or bad) once we start using it. IF the data

has never been used, then it would be naïve and self deceiving to assume that it is of the right

quality. A realistic approach would be to assume that it is not of the right quality, IF it ha snot

been used.

As the data is continued to be used, its quality issues come up and as a consequence its quality

gets improved. A good analogy could be that of a machine, a well oiled machine which is being

used is likely to continue to work as compared to a large machine that has not been used for a

long time.

The third law kind of supports or goes with the second law i.e. the more stringent use of the data

is, the more likely that the quality issues that crop up will be identified and fixed. Consider the

analogy of a map. A street map given in an atlas is fine as long as using it you can find the major

shopping areas, however, you may be surprised that you may not be able to find your house using

that map, because the map was not meant to handle the stringent use of locating your house.

Law-4 can have two possible exp lanations. One is rather obvious i.e. the shelf life of storage

medium which is very low for diskettes, comparatively better for magnetic tapes and very high

for CDs. Depending on which medium was used to store the data will dictate the data quality. The

other possibility is the meta data or people who are aware of the data anomalies but leave the

organization over a period of time by retiring or changing jobs or die.

Total Quality Management (TQM)

Philosophy of involving all for systematic and continuous improvement.

It is customer oriented. Why?

TQM incorporates the concept of product quality, process control, quality assurance, and quality

improvement.

Quality assurance is NOT Quality improvement

TQM approach is advocating the involvement of all employees in the continuous improvement

process, the ultimate goal being the customer satisfaction.

The TQM philosophy of management is customer-oriented. All members of a total quality

management (control) organization strive to systematically manage the improvement of the

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organization through the ongoing participation of all employees in problem solving efforts across

functional and hierarchical boundaries.

Quality assurance is a system of activities that assures conformance of product to pre -established

requirements.

Quality improvement is making all efforts to increase effectiveness and efficiency in meeting

accepted customer expectations.

Co$t of fixing data quality

n Defect minimization is economical.

Defect elimination is very very expensive

Figure-21.2: Co$t of fixing data quality

One can ask for the stars i.e. perfect data quality, only if there is no associated cost, in such a case

this may be a perfectly legitimate requirement. However, in real world, such a requirement is

NOT realistic. Why? If you give me an infinite amount of money, I will personally look at each

and every record and data element. But this is not realistic; you don't have enough money to pay

for that. Even if you had the money, it will take an inordinate amount of time to check each and

every record. By the time I am finished checking/fixing data, trends may have changed, and the

question that needed the data may no longer be interesting any more.

Note that as the data quality is pushed beyond a certain limit, law of diminishing returns sets in

i.e. increasing the input does not results in corresponding increase in output, actually the output

starts to go down in this the cost-quality ratio, as shown in Figure 21.2.

Co$t of Data Quality Defects

Controllable Costs

o Recurring costs for analyzing, correcting, and preventing data errors

Resultant Costs

o Internal and external failure costs of business opportunities missed.

Equipment & Training Costs

The costs are immense. Inaccurate data will lead to bad decisions, and bad decisions can never be

profitable. Unless the fingers of the CEO are on the pulse of the business, that business can not

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prosper. The pulse of the business is access to reliable data, without which a business can not be

managed.

Direct costs of data quality to a data intensive organization include the following:

1. Controllable costs: If possible, compare two or more alternatives for improving data quality.

Estimate the controllable, equipment, and training costs for each alternative. Include an estimate

of labor hours devoted to prevent, appraise, and correct problems.

2. Resultant costs: Missing business opportunities. Mis -communicating within the business or

with end customers and other information stakeholders. Sometimes resultant costs and indirect

costs are more difficult to quantify. Assess these costs wherever possible to adequately measure

the impacts of poor data quality. For example, the inability to match payroll records to the official

employment records can cost millions in payroll overpayments to retirees, personnel on leave

without pay status, and "ghost" employees. Inability to correlate purchase orders to invoices may

be a major problem in unmatched disbursements. Resultant costs, such as payroll overpayments

and unmatched disbursements, may be significant enough to warrant extensive changes in

processes, systems, policy and procedure, and information system data designs.

3. Equipment and training costs: Costs for data quality tools, ancillary hardware and software,

and training required to prevent, appraise, and correct data quality problems.

Where data quality is critical?

Almost everywhere, some examples:

Marketing communications.

Customer matching.

Retail house-holding.

Combining MIS systems after acquisition.

One of the reasons for the lack of planning to address data quality issues is that operational

system people don't sufficiently consider the business impact of bad data. Basically their goal is

to increase the number of (say) claims processed per hour. T o put it more positively, they must

better appreciate the opportunities of DWH applications that are critically dependent on data

quality. Following is a sampler of some CRM -based applications.

Marketing Communications : If you want to understand who your customers are, and if you

want to communicate effectively with them on the phone, mail and via email, you must have an

extraordinarily clean customer list. You destroy your credibility by using absurd or misspelled

addresses or names or by sending multipl e letters to the same person. Even worse, if the address

is invalid in some way, the letter never reaches the intending recipient.

Customer Matching : You want to find the same customer when the customer buys a second or a

third product from you. Customer matching is a major issue in banking and healthcare, where

separate customer (or patient) encounters are often listed separately. The average bank has great

difficulty listing all of the separate accounts of a given individual, although the reverse proces s of

listing all the individuals in a specific account is pretty straightforward.

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Retail House-holding: You want to find a group of people who comprise a family, each of

whom is your customer. When you correctly identify the household, you can communicate

coherently with its members. At that time you can identify the overall needs of the household and

suggest an effective consolidation or expansion of products. This process is called "cross-selling."

Cross-selling your own customer base is recognized as one of the most effective ways to increase

sales.

Combining Information Systems after an Acquisition: An increasingly common MIS problem

is merging customer lists and product lists from incompatible information systems after an

acquisition. Organizationally, it may be easy to imagine combining staffs and moving everything

to the corporate system after an acquisition, but what do you do with the data itself? Sometimes

the customer list is the most valuable asset of the acquired organization.

Characteristics or Dimensions of Data Quality

Data Quality

Definition

Characteristic

Accuracy

Qualitatively assessing lack of error, high accuracy

corresponding to small error.

Completeness

The degree to which values are present in the attributes that

require them.

Consistency

A measure of the degree to which a set of data satisfies a set

of constraints.

Timeliness

A measure of how current or up to date the data is.

Uniqueness

The state of being only one of its kind or being without an

equal or parallel.

Interpretability

The extent to which data is in appropriate languages,

symbols, and units, and the definitions are clear.

Accessibility

The extent to which data is available, or easily and quickly

retrievable

Objectivity

The extent to which data is unbiased, unprejudiced, and

impartial

95% accurate and 100% complete

100% accurate and 95% complete

Which is better?

Depends on data quality (i) tolerances,

the (ii) corresponding application and the (iii) cost of achieving that data quality vs. the (iv)

business value.

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