Keep your data clean

March 1, 2008

The main role of the BI is to present the data that comes in into various systems of the company. The data can have many sources and many entry points. Most of the entry points are controlled by other departments, for example the production department or the financial department.

One of the major issues for BI is the quality of the data. There are many cases in which the tracking systems, that are implemented at the production level, are implemented in a lousy way. That happens because the main goal of production is to get the product up and running. The tracking becomes a priority when they need to analyze how the product behaves. Once they need that they ask the BI department, the BI department has no clean data and thus the problem comes back to production. A circle gets in place and the two departments start blaming each other.  But who is to blame in reality?

In my opinion departments should work like applications that are connected with web services. Each department should provide stable entry points for the other departments, and should provide also safe output. Each department should make sure that the data he enters into other systems is safe and each department should be sure that the data he presents is safe, taking in account that the input data is correct.

For our case, the production department should consider that launching a product without the correct tracking procedure in place is equal to launching an unfinished product.

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