| The most recent industry statistics indicate that | | | | data and the number of total values ought to be |
| 25% of American business data is useless. This | | | | known |
| year alone businesses will squander away more | | | | - Uniqueness: Related to the number of duplicates |
| than $2.5 billion dollars. That's money which could | | | | in the data |
| have been delivered right to bottom lines or back | | | | It is important to conduct data validation prior to |
| into money making marketing initiatives. This is a | | | | implementing any data cleansing practices. By |
| serious issue that businesses to address. | | | | performing a complete diagnostic assessment of |
| However, it's so overwhelming that businesses | | | | the database's data content, valuable insight can |
| are not certain where to begin to correct this | | | | be gained into the quality of a company's |
| situation. | | | | database. Data validation processes are important |
| The first rule of effectively managing business | | | | to uncover problems with over and |
| information is to ensure that it is highly cleansed. | | | | under-matching or missing fields. |
| High quality data needs to pass a set of quality | | | | After the data validation process is complete, an |
| criteria. Those include: | | | | organization's database is ready for cleansing, also |
| - Accuracy: An aggregated value over the criteria | | | | referred to as "scrubbing." Data scrubbing |
| of integrity, consistency and density | | | | software organizes, standardizes, profiles, |
| - Integrity: An aggregated value over the criteria | | | | matches and merges and purges a company's |
| of completeness and validity | | | | database. Companies can then explore and mine |
| - Completeness: Achieved by correcting data | | | | this data by creating Household, Super Household, |
| containing anomalies | | | | account, Corporate and Individual views. This |
| - Validity: Approximated by the amount of data | | | | unprecedented insight into customers' unique |
| satisfying integrity constraints | | | | nuances make incremental sales success a reality. |
| - Consistency: Concerns contradictions and | | | | Businesses must invest in data validation and data |
| syntactical anomalies | | | | quality services in order to stay competitive and |
| - Uniformity: Directly related to irregularities | | | | profitable in today's economy. Data quality is truly |
| - Density: The quotient of missing values in the | | | | a business concern and not just an IT problem. |