Don't use contaminated data for business intelligence

The majority of companies in today's business climate assume that if they are using big data to advise their daily decisions, they're ahead of the pack. However, blindly relying on insights might not actually be giving firms a leg up in business intelligence if their information is contaminated with poor data quality, according to Info World.

Paraphrasing Mark Twain, the source points out that people tend to get in the most trouble for investing in and perpetuating facts or ideas that aren't true, while they are less often penalized for not having the answers in the first place.

Companies can easily fall into this trap if they are not verifying the data they collect at point-of-sale terminals, websites, mobile commerce pages and social networks, according to a recent Ataccama Tech Corner blog post. The source explains that business data is crucial to basic functionality and is necessary for successfully achieving more advanced goals.

As such, data users and analysts will need to clean data at various points of entry to ensure it hasn't been contaminated as it transitions from the point of entry to databases for use by different team members, the media outlet adds. This is becoming even more important as enterprises look to capture data in real time to facilitate improved decision making.