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Treat the cause of your data quality problems

·1 min

We spend a lot of our time fixing the symptoms of poor quality data. We:

  • Implement workarounds in our ETL
  • Develop complex architectures to limit the impact
  • Become gatekeepers for application changes so we can review them for any data impact

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 a lot of talking to a lot of people.

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


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    Andrew Jones
    Author
    Andrew Jones
    I build data platforms that reduce risk and drive revenue.