Emphasis on data quality is paying off

The corporate world has shown an increased level of commitment to maintaining data quality. Businesses have come to realize that while collecting big data is important, their data is useless if they're not able to take steps to verify each piece of information in their systems. As such, they've shown a willingness to spend.

According to Silicon Angle, there's been an overall uptick in spending on the "industrial internet," a vague term applying to all online tools that increase efficiency and reduce risk, often with a data-heavy bent. The news source reported that industrial internet spending was estimated at $20 billion for 2012, which reflects total costs of all equipment, including computers, sensors, cloud solutions, services and labor. Total spending in this area by the end of the decade is expected to reach $500 billion.

David Floyer, chief technology officer and co-founder of Wikibon, noted that as companies seek to ramp up their industrial tools, data quality has become a key area of emphasis.

"We were interested in the Internet of Things, what was going to happen after the consumer internet," Floyer told the news source. "We were looking at other big data areas, and the quality of data coming out of these machines is much, much higher than that coming from the consumer internet."

Companies have begun to realize that even if maintaining data quality appears expensive on the surface, it's a practice that will pay off in the long run. If companies make long-term business decisions based on inaccurate information, their mistakes can have far-reaching effects. Quality initiatives may cost money, but they save much more.

Businesses have rapidly ramped up their spending on technology in recent years. Improving data quality is just one component of a larger movement toward a more advanced corporate world.