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Information value

Characteristic Name: Information value
Dimension: Usability and Interpretability
Description: Quality information should provide a business value to the organization
Granularity: Information object
Implementation Type: Process-based approach
Characteristic Type: Usage

Verification Metric:

The number of tasks failed or under performed due to the lack of business value delivered by the information
The number of complaints received due to the lack of business value delivered by the information

GuidelinesExamplesDefinitons

The implementation guidelines are guidelines to follow in regard to the characteristic. The scenarios are examples of the implementation

Guidelines: Scenario:
Continuously asses the relevance and the usefulness of existing data to the organisational goals (Strategic level). (1)What is the cost of poor quality customer data to the organisation in concern?
(2) What revenue can be generated from data?
Continuously asses the usefulness of information based on the tasks at hand (Operational level) (1) Can we predict our future market share from the existing market information?
Monitor and Measure if the intended goal of the data presentation/Interpretation is achieved (1) Employee efficiency data is displayed in a dash board to motivate employees. The effectiveness of this display can be measured by examining the efficiency gain of each employee.
(2) Has the given sales forecast for the last three years been reasonably accurate compared to actuals.

Validation Metric:

How mature is the process to maintain the business value of information

These are examples of how the characteristic might occur in a database.

Example: Source:
Consider a database containing orders from customers. A practice for handling complaints and returns is to create an “adjustment” order for backing out the original order and then writing a new order for the corrected information if applicable. This procedure assigns new order numbers to the adjustment and replacement orders. For the accounting department, this is a high-quality database. All of the numbers come out in the wash. For a business analyst trying to determine trends in growth of orders by region, this is a poor-quality database. If the business analyst assumes that each order number represents a distinct order, his analysis will be all wrong. Someone needs to explain the practice and the methods necessary to unravel the data to get to the real numbers (if that is even possible after the fact). J. E. Olson, “Data Quality: The Accuracy Dimension”, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 9 January 2003.

The Definitions are examples of the characteristic that appear in the sources provided.

Definition: Source:
1) A measure of the degree to which data will produce the desired business transaction or outcome.

2) A measure of the perception of and confidence in the quality of the data; the importance, value, and relevance of the data to business needs.

D. McGilvray, “Executing Data Quality Projects: Ten Steps to Quality Data and Trusted Information”, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2008.
As a data quality-oriented organization matures, the agreement of usage will move from a small set of “early adopters” to gradually encompass more and more of the enterprise, Ubiquity measures the degree to which different departments in an organization use shared reference data. LOSHIN, D. 2001. Enterprise knowledge management: The data quality approach, Morgan Kaufmann Pub.
Data are beneficial and provide advantages for their use. WANG, R. Y. & STRONG, D. M. 1996. Beyond accuracy: What data quality means to data consumers. Journal of management information systems, 5-33.

 

Business rules compliance

Characteristic Name: Business rules compliance
Dimension: Validity
Description: Data should comply with business rules
Granularity: Element
Implementation Type: Rule-based approach
Characteristic Type: Declarative

Verification Metric:

The number of tasks failed or under performed due to lack of data precision
The number of complaints received due to lack of data precision

GuidelinesExamplesDefinitons

The implementation guidelines are guidelines to follow in regard to the characteristic. The scenarios are examples of the implementation

Guidelines: Scenario:
Identify data related business rules separately (business rules that determines the value of data elements and business rules that get executed depending on the values of data elements) and organise them into a separate executable data rules engine (1) The system maintains price routines to handle price related data Element :Discount rate
A price routine (procedure) can be maintained to calculate the discount rate considering the rules

R1:All registered customers get a discount of 6%
R2:All gold customers get a discount of 12%
R3:All purchases greater than $500 get a discount of 5%

Implement a stewardship structure for business rules (parallel to stewardship structure for data) and manage the changes to the rules properly (1) Sales director is responsible for discounts and his approval is needed to change a discount rate. Only the sales manager can change the rules related to discounts.
Maintain an error log to identify the problems resulted in the data rules repository where the problematic data records can be identified precisely (1) Rules engines
Continuously monitor the root causes for the errors recorded in the log and take preventive actions by amending the rules, fixing the technical defects in the system etc. (1) Some trip data is missing for a particular journey in the go card system and as a result an unacceptable journey duration was resulted. New rules were implemented to process such data using a different criteria

Validation Metric:

How mature is the creation and implementation of the data related business rules

These are examples of how the characteristic might occur in a database.

Example: Source:
One common example in education is the student school of record. While most students do not change schools during an academic year, many do, especially in urban settings. Thus, the school at which students are tested may not be the school at which they received most of their instruction. Because school-level student achievement measures become increasingly invalid as the number of mobile students increases, many districts will hold schools accountable only for those students who were enrolled for a full academic year. In this case, student achievement measures for a given school lose validity as the percentage of mobile students increases. J. G. Watson, S. B. Kraemer, and C. A. Thorn, “Data Quality Essentials. Guide to Implementation: Resources for Applied Practice”, August 2009.

The Definitions are examples of the characteristic that appear in the sources provided.

Definition: Source:
Determines the extent to which data is not missing important relationship linkages. For example, the launch date for a new product must be valid and must be the first week of any quarter, since all new products are launched in the first week of each quarter. D. McGilvray, “Executing Data Quality Projects: Ten Steps to Quality Data and Trusted Information”, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2008.
1) Data values conform to the Specified Business Rules.

2) A derived or calculated data value is Produced Correctly according to a specified Calculation Formula or set of Derivation Rules.

ENGLISH, L. P. 2009. Information quality applied: Best practices for improving business information, processes and systems, Wiley Publishing.