THE IMPORTANCE OF THE QUALITY OF DATA

Since information is an important resource for any organisation, information presented to users must be of high quality. The information must be up to date, complete, sufficiently accurate for the purpose it is required, unambiguously understood, consistent and available when it is required.

It is essential that information is up to date. When customers buy their shopping at the supermarket they need to be charged the current price for the items they have bought, not the price that was current yesterday before the start of today’s cut-price promotion. Similarly, managers reordering stock need to be aware of the current, not last week’s, stock levels in order to ensure that they are not over or under-stocked.

Only when the information available is complete can appropriate decisions be made. When a bank is considering a request for a loan from a customer, it is important that full details of the customer’s financial position is known to safeguard both the bank’s and the customer’s interests.

Information on which important decisions are made must be accurate; any errors in the potential loan customer’s financial information could lead to losses for the bank, for example. Whilst it is important that information is accurate, it is possible for the information to be ‘too accurate’, leading to the information being misinterpreted. Earlier I quoted ‘190267 metres’ as the distance between two points, say London and Birmingham. But the figure ‘190267’ implies that this distance has been measured to the nearest metre. Is this realistic? Would it not be more appropriate to quote this figure as ‘190 kilometres (to the nearest 10 kilometres)’? I cannot answer that question without knowing why I need to know the distance between London and Birmingham. Information should be accurate, but only sufficiently accurate for the purpose for which it is required.

To be accurate from a user perspective, information must also be unambiguously understood. There should be no doubt as to whether the distance the user is being given is the straight-line distance or the distance by road. The data should also be consistent. A query asking for the distance between London and Birmingham via a specified route should always come up with the same answer.

Information has to be readily available when and where it is required to be used. When it is time to reorder stock for the supermarket then the information required to decide the amount of replacement stock to be ordered has to be available on the desk of the manager making those decisions.

Information is derived from the processing of data. It is vital, therefore, that the data we process to provide the information is of good quality. Only with good-quality data can we guarantee the quality of the information. Good quality data is data that is accurate, correct, consistent, complete and up to date. The meaning of the data must also be unambiguous.