Preventing issue re-occurrence

In Chapter 8, we provided a table of the key governance activities that are required during the remediation phase. The last of these was the prevention of re-occurrence. This starts in the remediation phase but becomes a key activity as your initiative transitions from a project-style activity to a business-as-usual activity.

If remediation is completed as a one-off activity without understanding why the data quality issue arose in the first place, the issues will simply re-occur in the future. The remediation effort will eventually need to be repeated. It is possible to avoid this with a proper understanding of the cause, a change in systems or processes to resolve that cause, and then ongoing monitoring to ensure the quality remains sufficiently high.

One organization that I worked with used a Big Four consulting firm to complete and correct their supplier data. The work was completed on an entirely manual basis (from detecting the issues to remediation...