Data repair requires multiple steps

Companies' heavy use of digital information has led to increases in business agility and insight. However, problems can derail even the best efforts. Sometimes, data quality is simply lacking and IT departments must find ways to remedy these situations. According to Harvard Business Review contributor Thomas Redman, the one thing employees must not do is let the problem fester.

He explained that it is important that IT leaders realize the seriousness of their data quality issues and make a concerted effort to fix the problems. He explained that there are two essential steps to the process. First, companies must make an effort to clear up any problems already present in the information. Redman noted that cleansing can only take firms so far, however.

Having dealt with extant problems, companies must press into preventative data quality efforts. According to Redman, firms should be aware of what data will be used for as it is collected and make sure it is suitable for those purposes. This is especially pressing for big data, which businesses can collect extremely quickly.

According to Information Management contributor Michele Goetz, the way to run data management programs on unstructured information is quite different from traditional procedures. She explained that classic data quality assessments can help detect potential risk within large samples, even if they cannot cleanse the whole archive.