Data quality is often defined as a process that an organization undertakes to manage the value of their information assets so that individual records are accurate, updated and consistently represented across the enterprise. Accurate information and sound business decisions rely upon clean and consistent data sources that provide information about an organizations products, suppliers, financial details, and most importantly, their customers. Good data quality means that an organization’s data is accurate, complete, consistent, timely, unique, and valid. The better the data, the more clearly it presents an accurate, consolidated view of the organization, across systems, departments and line of business and the more likely that an organization will be in a position to meet or exceed it’s goals.

Is a centralized, enterprise-wide operations imperative that encompasses the people, processes and procedures required to create a single consistent, view of an organization's data.

Data Governance initiatives improve data quality by assigning a team to develop and manage processes that ensure data's accuracy, accessibility, consistency, and completeness, among other metrics. It is imperative that this team consists of executive leadership, project management, line-of-business managers, and data stewards. The team usually employs some form of methodology for tracking and improving enterprise data, such as Six Sigma™, and tools for data mapping, profiling, cleansing and monitoring data. Most large companies have many line of business applications and databases that lack context-based integration. Therefore, knowledge-workers within large organizations often don't always have access to the information they need to best do their jobs. When they do have the data, the data quality may be faulty due to lack of inconsistent quality standards and processes. By creating and enforcing a comprehensive data governance practice, these problems can be mitigated.

• Annik provides clients with key management insight in terms of how data stewardship creates and manages the appropriate metrics and controls surrounding data management processes. We can seamlessly support the processes within an ongoing governance program, provide key leadership and insight for organizations building a governance program, and adapt our proprietary data governance tools for use within your data governance program.