Setting up data quality for success

My best advice for setting up your data quality program is to start small, be specific, be transparent, and scale rapidly. Pick a handful of metrics or a couple of key reports, and show the value of understanding the data, tracing the lineage, and measuring the quality of the data. Remediate issues quickly and visibly and show improvement in the data for these key metrics and/or reports.

Be very clear with your stakeholders, both users and executives alike: the goal is not to create perfect data for the enterprise. The goal is to deploy resources (time, money, people) for the most effective return on those resources. You could spend unlimited time and money remediating every data element, but it would be like trying to plug every hole in every boat in every ocean. Sometimes, you just need to build a better boat. You may run into instances where a report is incredibly low quality. It might be easier to completely recreate the report with different...