Data Quality Audit Tool – A Great Source for Effective Data Quality Management

Data quality is one of the major concerns of every business relying on electronic data for the business’s processes. All the major operations and business decisions of the data-driven companies rely on good and usable data only. If the data is bad, it is just a wastage to the business whether it is time or money. It causes frustration as well on the part of the user. To check the quality of data it is important to deploy a data quality audit tool to understand how much improvement needs to be done in order to maintain a good level of data quality in the organization.

Without the knowledge of the actual state of data in the organization it is impossible to take data quality management steps. A data quality audit tool helps in understanding how much data dirt is there in the system and what is the overall data quality in the system. This process of audit needs to be done regularly in order to maintain a good level of quality always since bad data is never acceptable in an organization. If at any point of time data quality audit performed by the tool shows a low-level of data quality, the quality management initiatives have to be taken more in order to come above the required level of quality.

Data Quality Audit Tool Challenges

• More than half of the organizations relying on big amounts of data are not performing data audits or they perform it only when any data quality issue arises.
• Data audit is viewed as a time-consuming and resource consuming activity and most of the organizations do not like to dedicate resources on data auditing activities.
• The organizations that do not perform regular data audits in the company are not aware of how bad their data is. The end result can be security and compliance issues which are drastic when they occur.
• Most of the organizations are unaware of the location of data sources and sometimes they are using sources carrying rough data which is not in the knowledge of the IT department.
• IT department is not aware of who is using which kind of data and where. This leads to low trust level for data use in the organization and there becomes a big possibility of misuse of data within the organization.

Thus data quality audit is important in every organization and the challenges associated to it have to be faced ensuring the complete level of information in every organization regarding the current quality of data used. There are a number of data quality audit tool available and the best one suiting the needs of the company should be selected.