Data quality monitoring work can be a pain, especially when you see recurring issues. Every organization needs a way to track down problems with data quality. If you're regularly seeing problems with the quality of your data, follow these four tips.
Automate the Process
You will always have a hard time doing data monitoring work. However, data quality monitoring software will help you to spread your limited attention across as many systems as possible. Data monitoring software can scan for patterns and flag problems. You can then use reports and logs to identify issues and start hunting for potential sources of trouble.
Look for Commonalities
Not all data quality monitoring issues will be uniform. However, the nature of digital systems means many problems will have commonalities. If you're gathering data from customers using website forms, for example, you may notice a few basic patterns. Web data often has issues because of security measures to prevent injection attacks. Likewise, users may not understand the fields, leading to mismatched or mistyped data entries.
Use the logs and reports from your data monitoring software. If you see a cluster of issues surrounding entries from a particular phone app, for example, you can then start a code audit to see what the problem may be.
Employ Pattern Recognition Technology
Some commonalities will be evident to the human eye. Others will not be. Data quality monitoring software can develop patterns to scan information. You can build definitions based on patterns for both good and bad data. This will allow the data monitoring software to recognize and flag significantly more problems. In time, you should be able to use the software to apply quick fixes and reduce the need for human intervention.
Map Your Networked Systems
If you don't currently have a map of the flow of data within your organization, develop one now. You want to be able to compare information from logs and reports to the various systems on your network. Ideally, you should be able to map issues to the devices so you can see precisely where data quality issues appear. Even in a less-than-ideal scenario, you can at least rule out certain systems as possible culprits.
Especially if a problem originates with a specific machine, such as a network security appliance, you should be able to take direct action to remedy the source of the problem. This will always beat papering over the issue by using software to fix buggy data after the fact.
Employ data quality monitoring software to get the most out of your business.
Share18 January 2022
When I decided to go back to school after I was finished raising my kids, I knew that I would face a long and arduous road ahead of me. I didn't know what college would bring, but I did know that I would need to embrace technology and learn a few tricks of the trade. After I started school, I was blown away with how much the world had changed. My teachers expected me to do my homework online, which for me at the time was pretty overwhelming. My blog shares my journey of learning about computers and technology from a child's perspective--as an adult.