WILL POOR DATA RUIN DATA WAREHOUSING?

Chief information officers and data base administrators need to pay closer attention to poor data quality. If they don’t, the result might be a failed data warehousing or customer relationship management project.

"By 2005, more than 50 percent of projects will fail," Ted Friedman, a senior research analyst, told session attendees Oct. 9 at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2001in Orlando. "Fortune 1000 companies will spend or lose more on operational efficiencies in the back-office than on data warehousing or CRM. These seem like shocking statistics, but the points of business failure include denial about data quality issues."

Bad data can affect companies in varying degrees, ranging from causing simple embarrassment to multimillion dollar mistakes. Bad data can come from a variety of sources – errors in data entry, erroneous data received across the Internet, faulty data purchased or acquired from an outside source or simply combining good data with outdated data and not having the ability to distinguish between the two.

The single most challenging aspect when companies are ready to face data quality head-on is the determination of exactly how bad is the data problem.

"Poor data quality needs to be treated as a business issue," Friedman says.

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