“Information is the best disinfectant”

I went to an excellent talk recently by well known English politician Tony Benn as part of the Lichfield Literature Festival. One quotation he provided was the inspiration and title for this blog post

“Information is the best disinfectant”.

The statement on its own may not make sense, but was used in the context of explaining how the publication of information on the abuse of the parliamentary expenses system by MPs both highlighted the problem and created the solution. Once MPs realised that any abuses would be made public, and that their viability as an elected politician may be compromised, many started to voluntarily repay expenses that may have been inappropriately claimed.

For those not familiar with the story, the image above is a “duck house” claimed on parliamentary expenses by Sir Peter Viggers. Not surprisingly, he did not stand in the 2010 election!

So what does all this have to do with data quality?

Take COINS data analysis with a pinch of salt?

Recently the UK government published extracts from the COINS database. COINS stands for the Combined On-line Information System and the extract contains details of all expenditure by UK Government Departments over £25K for the years 2008/9 and 2009/10. Expenditure is divided into budget expenditure, actual and forecast out-turn data. The release of this data comes as a result of the current coalition government’s desire for greater openness.

If we take a look at these extracts from a data quality perspective, then this may give an indication of whether any resulting analysis needs to be treated with “a pinch of salt”.

Business Intelligence without Data Quality

I have just caught up in reading a recent supplement to the Times newspaper entitled “Business Intelligence“. As is often the case for such supplements, this is sponsored ‘advertorial’ content paid for by some of the key software providers in this area which proposes some interesting (perhaps controversial) views.

There is no such thing as a data quality problem…

Over the last couple of days I have presented at a couple of conferences on the subject of Asset Information Management. When discussing with a delegate on Tuesday the nature of data quality problems, they asked:

Are data quality problems often user problems?

My immediate response was that all data quality problems are user/people problems. If we recognise this fact, then solving data quality problems involves solving people problems.