Embedding Data Quality in Organizations

At the end of Chapter 8, we established how to go about calculating and publicizing the benefits of the work that’s done in the organization to remediate data. This chapter is about how to make those benefits sustainable in the long term. If the organization remediates the data as a “one-off exercise,” there will be benefits, but in the medium to long term, the data will return to a low state of quality.

Essentially, sustaining the benefits comes from two areas – firstly, making changes to the way that data is collected in the first place and secondly, continuing the activities outlined in Chapters 3 to 8, but on a smaller scale, in a business-as-usual context.

I will refer regularly to the term “business as usual” throughout this chapter. The term means the day-to-day operational work to keep an organization running smoothly, excluding all project and one-off activities. For example, one of the...