Whatever industry you’re in or what merchandise you’re selling, you’ll come across the anecdote “importance of data” at some point during your company’s existence. It is, without a doubt, playing a critical role in enabling entrepreneurs to make decisions based on trends, facts, and statistical data.

One of the most important rules to remember when using data for business is that the quality of your data has a direct impact on the quality of your decisions. Knowing it, on the other hand, isn’t very useful. 

You should measure the quality of your data and act on these metrics to enhance it if you want to see actual outcomes. However, most firms fail when it comes to handling large amounts of data and maintaining data quality, and the reasons are numerous, including a lack of resources, time, and so on.

Hence, we’ve discussed some tips to assist you in monitoring data quality using appropriate metrics, in this article.

What Is Data Quality Management (DQM) and How Does It Work?

Data quality management is a set of procedures aimed at ensuring that data is of good quality. DQM encompasses all aspects of data management, from data collection to advanced data processing to data delivery. It also necessitates a managerial oversight of the data you’ve gathered. 

Effective data quality management is considered critical to any consistent data analysis, since data quality is critical to draw actionable and, more importantly, correct insights from your data.

There are numerous ways you may employ to increase the quality of your data. DQM processes prepare your company to tackle the problems of digital era data, no matter where or when they occur.

What Is the Best Way to Monitor Data Quality Management?

The metrics that you use to analyze the quality of your company data are known as data quality metrics. They assess the usefulness and relevance of your data, allowing you to distinguish between high-quality and low-quality data. 

Data quality metrics must be of the highest quality and specified among the many quality management strategies. Accuracy, Consistency, Completeness, Integrity, Validity, and Timeliness are all aspects of quality.

While data analysis might be complicated, there are a few core measurements that all-important DQM stakeholders should be familiar with.

Metrics for data quality are critical for providing the greatest and most reliable foundation for future analysis. These indicators will also assist you in tracking the efficacy of your quality improvement initiatives, which is necessary to ensure that you are on the correct track.

Let’s take a look at each of these six types of metrics and see what they have to offer.

Accuracy

This term refers to real-time business transactions or status changes. Source documentation (i.e., from business contacts) should be used to assess accuracy, but if that isn’t possible, independent confirmation approaches should be used. It will reveal whether or not the data is free of substantial errors.

A common metric for measuring accuracy is the data-to-errors ratio, which counts the number of known errors (such as a missing, incomplete, or redundant item) concerning the data set. Of course, this percentage should improve over time, indicating that the quality of your data is improving.

There is no set data-to-error ratio because it varies so much on the size and type of your data set – although the higher the better, of course. 

Consistency

Consistency means that two data values extracted from different data sets should not disagree. Consistency, on the other hand, does not always indicate correctness.

A rule that verifies that the total number of employees in each department of a corporation does not exceed the overall number of employees in that organization is an example of consistency.

Completeness

If there is enough information to reach conclusions, completeness will reflect this. Each data entry can be judged for completeness by assessing if it is a “full” data entry. All applicable data entry fields must be filled in, and no important information should be missing from sets of data records.

For example, in an inventory/warehousing setting, the number of empty values inside a data set is a simple quality measure to use: this means that each line of an item relates to a product, and each of them must contain a product identification. The line item is not valid unless that product identifier is put in. Then you should track that measure over time to lower it.

Integrity

Integrity, often known as data validation, is the structural verification of data to ensure that it follows rules. This indicates that there are no inadvertent data errors, and it is labeled appropriately (e.g., date, month, and year).

It all boils down to the data transformation error rate in this case. The statistic you wish to employ measures how frequently data transformation operations fail in comparison to the total number of operations – or, in other words, how often the process of taking data stored in one format and converting it to another fails.

Validity

Validity is a metric that assesses how well data adheres to specified value qualities. For instance, ensuring that dates are formatted in the same way, such as date/month/year or month/date/year.

For example, in one of the case studies, the company’s business depended on direct mail. However, without the proper formatting, it was difficult to identify family members or company employees. This problem was permanently resolved after they improved their data validation method.

Finding the percentage of data with values inside the allowed range is an example of a validity metric.

Timeliness

The expectation of information availability and accessibility is referred to as timeliness. To put it another way, it quantifies the time between when data is expected and when it is ready to use.

The data time-to-value is a statistic for monitoring timeliness. It’s critical to monitor and optimize this time because it has a lot of implications for a company’s success. 

The optimal time to derive valuable data information is always right now, therefore the sooner you have access to it, the better. Whatever method you use to increase the quality of your data, you must always evaluate the results of your efforts. 

All of these data quality metrics examples are useful for evaluating your operations and should not be overlooked. The more you examine, the better you can improve, so keeping it under control is critical.