Managing inactive and duplicate data
One key aspect of data quality not mentioned in this chapter so far is the management of inactive and duplicate records. The best organizations from a data governance perspective have a clear policy to identify and remove records that are no longer actively being used for transactions in the organization or are potentially duplicated.
However, in reality, these organizations represent just the top few percent. Most organizations are not good at this or are only good at this where they see the greatest risk. For example, a business in a heavily regulated industry might archive production records as soon as they can according to regulations to avoid future inspections identifying flaws originating before the regulatory period.
Managing duplicate and inactive data is a critical part of data quality management. I will explain how managing this properly can reduce the workload of remediation and avoid focusing on old, unused data.
