Looking for Better Insights? Clean Up Your Data

If your organization is looking to make sense of its data, your first step must be to evaluate your data management practices. That is, ensure your data is consistent, accurate, adequately governed and that nothing or no one is doing anything to undermine its integrity.

But whether you’re worried about data quality moving forward or trying to clean up an archive of messy data, you’ll face a bewildering number of choices in the marketplace.

Choosing the Right Option

Businesses and governments invested $1.4 billion in data quality tools in 2014. By 2017, that number rose to more than $2.1 billion. But not every tool performs the same function or accomplishes the same goal. Consider these seven distinct categories:

Generalized Cleansing – Modifies data values to meet domain restrictions, integrity constraints or other business rules.

Data Profiling and Data Quality Measurement – Conducts analysis to capture metadata which can help identify data quality issues.

Parsing and Standardization – Simplifies text fields to their component parts and formats values into consistent layouts.

Matching – Identifies, links or merges related entries within or across datasets.

Monitoring – Imposes controls to ensure data conforms to business rules which define data quality for the organization.

Issue Resolution and Workflow – Enables key collaborators (i.e. data stewards) to Identify, quarantine and resolve data quality issues using processes and interfaces.

Enrichment – Appends related attributes from external data sources (such as mapping or location data) to enhance the value of internally held data.

Acknowledging you need to cleanse your data is a step in the right direction. But your next move is critical. It’s important to understand how your current goals and future objectives will influence your technology investments – especially if you’re considering moving beyond traditional business intelligence.

From helping you choose the right application to developing and executing strategies to assess data quality and clean up legacy data, MNP can position you for analytics and help you become a fully digital business.

Tomorrow’s technology is shaping business today. To learn more about how MNP can help you improve your information governance initiatives, contact John Desborough, Director Consulting and Technology Solutions at john.desborough@mnp.ca.