Improving Data Warehouse and Business Information Quality: Methods for Reducing Costs and Increasing Profits

CHAPTER 9

Improving Information Process Quality: Data Defect Prevention

“People forget how fast you did a job—but they remember how well you did it.”

–HOWARD NEWTON

This is where the payoff is. The first four processes of an information quality improvement methodology represent the costs of inspection or the costs of information scrap and rework. The efforts expended in information process improvement eliminate defective data, and with it the costs of process failure caused by unquality information. By focusing on information process improvement, the enterprise will see its costs (of information scrap and rework) go down, and its profits (of exploited business opportunity) go up. The motivation for this is simply to reduce costs, increase profits, increase value, and increase customer satisfaction.

In this chapter we first describe the business case for data defect prevention through process improvement by analyzing the costs of correction and the costs of quality data production at the source. The fact that nonquality data exists is a symptom that the information processes are broken.

We describe how to improve business processes to eliminate the cause of unquality data. The same process applied to improving manufacturing processes works effectively for improving information production processes.

We conclude with a section of Best Practices and Guidelines for Information Quality to help you jump-start your own process improvement program.

Why Make Information Process Quality Improvements? ...