Corporate data quality management: From theory to practice

It is now assumed that poor quality data is costing large amounts of money to corporations all over the world. Although research on methods and techniques for data quality assessment and improvement have begun in the early nineties of the past century and being currently abundant and innovative, it is noted that the academic and professional communities virtually have no dialogue, which turns out to be harmful to both of them. The challenge of promoting the relevance in information systems research, without compromising the necessary rigor, is still present in the various disciplines of information systems scientific area, including the data quality one. In this paper we present “data as a corporate asset” as a business philosophy, and a framework for the concepts related to that philosophy, derived from the academic and professional literature. According to this framework, we present, analyze and discuss a single explanatory case study, developed in a fixed and mobile telecommunications company, operating in one of the European Union Countries. The results show that, in the absence of data stewardship roles, data quality problems become more of an "IT problem" than typically is considered in the literature, owing to Requirements Analysis Teams of the IS Development Units, to become a “quality negotiator” between the various stakeholders. Other findings are their bottom-up approach to data quality management, their biggest focus on motivating employees through innovative forms of communication, which appears to be a critical success factor (CSF) for data quality management, as well as the importance of a data quality champion leadership.