Bringing Data Quality to Life

Data is growing explosively! According to one study, an incredible 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is created every day, 90% of the world’s data has been created in the last two years alone. For enterprises, this is a good-news-and-bad-news scenario. The good news is, of course, that with more data, enterprises have more opportunities to leverage it to grow their business. The bad news is that without the right analytics tools, they might be lost and even drowned in the ocean of data.

Data quality is one of the roadblocks.

While there are data quality tools to help profile and cleanse data, dealing with issues such as duplicate and inaccurate data, data quality information is not as helpful as it is supposed to be. One of the reasons is that as data is often siloed, so is data quality information.

Data quality is a living organism, evolving and flowing throughout the data supply chain. In order to bring data quality to life, enterprises need an information intelligence platform in a form of a knowledge graph with the following capabilities:

• Ingest metadata of all data types, across all systems and departments to have a centralized view in the knowledge graph and break the data silos
• Determine data quality and aggregate all data quality information in the same knowledge graph
• Validate data quality via data lineage
• Trace and document changes in data quality
• Identify root-causes of quality issues in near real-time
• Propagate data quality information and, by extension, trust in data
• Provide all types of data users—data steward, custodian, analyst, compliance officer, and other business users—with visibility into data quality. By doing so, they can be more efficient in consuming the data of the quality about which they feel confident

Powered with these capabilities, enterprises are in a much better position to understand the quality of data at every step throughout the entire data supply chain, from source to target, visually and dynamically. The adoption of this enterprise information intelligence graph thus enables organizations to bring data quality to life. It empowers business users to leverage high quality data to gain insights and make the right decisions more quickly.

About the author: Niu Bai, Ph.D. is the Head of Global Business Development and Partnerships at Orion Governance, Inc.