It's about data applicability, not quality

I wrote yesterday how data quality shouldn’t be the focus.

But even with that, at some point you’ll be looking at a dataset and thinking “is this data good enough for what I want to use it for?”.

Most people will say you’re assessing the quality of the data.

But really, it’s the applicability.

That applicability is dependant on your use case, at that point in time.

And data that is applicable to your use case, may not be applicable to someone else’s.

So, how do you know if you can apply the data to your use case?

You need the data owner to set the expectations. For example:

• How timely will it be?
• How complete will it be?
• What are the support levels?

And so on.

Knowing that, you can now make an objective decision about the data’s applicability.