Chapter List

Part Overview

There are certain technical skills that are absolutely essential if an organization is to effectively manage and improve data quality. These include the following:

• Understanding customer needs (Chapter 17 ). After all, if customers are the final arbiters of quality, it pays to understand what they want.

• Measurement of actual quality levels against requirements (Chapters 18 and 19 ).

• Controls (gasp!) to keep errors from leaking through to customers (Chapter 20).

• Statistical control (double gasp!!) to make future performance predictable. In particular, to know that future errors will be prevented (Chapter 21 ).

• Quality improvement to close the most important gaps between actual and required performance (Chapter 22 ).

• Quality planning to set targets for improvement and to design new information chains (Chapters 23 and 24 ).

Five of these tasks are among the ten elements of successful second-generation data quality systems.

This section describes how these tasks are accomplished. As noted, they are the essential skills of data quality management and improvement, and...