Treat the cause of data quality problems, not the symptoms

Staging layers, medallion architectures, data testing, assigning data stewards, gatekeeping application changes until reviewed by a data team.

Those are all fixing the symptoms of poor quality data.

They help you manage and work around the issues caused by it as best you can. But they don’t improve data quality.

The poor quality data comes from the source systems.

So, to treat the cause, you need to address data quality at the source.

You need to talk to your product teams and application owners, incentivise them to care about the data they are providing, and support them with the tools that allow them to easily produce better quality data.

It might not be easy! It involves talking to people.

But it’s the only way to improve the quality of your data.