What is Data Quality Assessment? 

Data quality assessment also known as a data audit. Is an assessment or analysis of the quality of your data. Data should be complete, current, correct and consistent, and not include duplicates. While no database can be 100%, it can come close. To measure the quality of data some companies resort to establish a data quality score which, monitoring over a period of time can help identify data quality issues.

What is included in a Data Quality Assessment? 

Data quality audit includes estimating the number of duplicates, percentage of data that is incomplete, percentage of data that is not current (typically based on date created/modified), fields that are inconsistent or can be normalized and what percentage of data is in accurate. Other things that can be included in a data audit: data governance practices, security flaws, auditing user’s data integrity such as data quality per sales rep or department, and so on.

How is Data Audit Performed? 

Depending on data size, either a portion of the data is selected or the full data set is exported to be reviewed. Once data is available, an audit can be performed. With a quick check on number of duplicates such as same email address for contacts or same company name for companies to get a rough estimate of duplicates. Fields are then reviewed to identify completion rates per each record. Each field is reviewed for possible standardization. For correctness, a few things can be done either matched against a third party database to establish outdated data or simply by identifying bogus records. Finally, a review of date created, last activity or last modified date can give and indication of the age of the database.

What is the final outcome? 

Once the data audit is received, it is easy to spot issues. If duplicate rates are greater than 2-3%, then de-duping should be a priority. Data completeness, standardization and identifying outdated data are the next steps post de-duping. Prior to beginning a data cleaning project, it is important to use the data quality assessment to develop a data cleaning plan. The project depending on the scope can be anywhere from a week’s time to a couple of months.

To receive your free data quality assessment, contact StrategicDB at www.strategicdb.com.