A recent report in TDWI found that bad data costs U.S. businesses $600 billion a year. Oftentimes, data analysts are accountable for the data quality for consumers and providers of data. However, profiling data and writing rules against the data to improve the quality of extracted data takes time and effort from a data SME which will then be used by downstream consumers.
Informatica has consistently been the leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant of providing business friendly data integration tools supporting many aspects of enterprise information management, including Informatica data quality (IDQ). Informatica’s market leading ability comes from factors such as reliability, re-usability, portability, and strong integration across their portfolio of enterprise information management products such as Metadata Manager, Powercenter, and Proactive Monitoring. In addition, the flexibility of providing both on premise and cloud-based solutions provide flexibility of the organization’s budget to afford data quality capabilities.
A data quality governance workflow is shown below:
In order to quantify the return on investment, IDQ provides both out-of-the-box rules and features such as profiles and scorecards. In addition, features such as Data as a Service (DaaS) provide data quality and data enrichment to assist Informatica’s market-leading MDM products. What impressed me the most about IDQ is the versatility of the tool to create business rules for business people to write data quality validation rules and then apply the same rule in the back-end as an ETL process by just exporting the rule as a mapplet.
IDQ in conjunction with good business knowledge and data quality framework can offer a reliable data quality solution to meet organizational data quality objectives. In addition, better data quality can eliminate unnecessary delays in project management and avoid an iterative clean up process. Data quality scorecards can be created with key metrics for your data which will allow you to track improvements in your data quality over time. Enterprise information management is critical to your organization’s success – and IDQ is one element to achieving it.
