The impact of poor data quality on the typical enterprise

Abstract

Poor data quality has far-reaching effects and consequences. The article aims to increase the awareness by providing a summary of impacts of poor data quality on a typical enterprise. These impacts include customer dissatisfaction, increased operational cost, less effective decision-making and a reduced ability to make and execute strategy. More subtly perhaps, poor data quality hurts employee morale, breeds organizational mistrust, and makes it more difficult to align the enterprise. Creating awareness of a problem and its impact is a critical first step towards resolution of the problem. The needed awareness of the poor data quality, while growing, has not yet been achieved in many enterprises. After all, the typical executive is already besieged by too many problems, low customer satisfaction, high costs, a data warehouse project that is late, and so forth. Creating awareness of issues of the accuracy level and impacts within the enterprise is the first obstacle that practitioners must overcome when implementing data quality programs.