Data Quality is an elusive subject that can defy measurement and yet be critical enough to derail any project, strategic initiative, or even a company. The data layer of an organization is a critical component because it is so easy to ignore the quality of that data or to make overly optimistic assumptions about its efficacy. Having Data Quality as a focus is a business philosophy that aligns strategy, business culture, company information, and technology in order to manage data to the benefit of the enterprise. It is a competitive strategy.

However, you can’t improve what you can’t measure. We need a means for measuring the quality of our data. Abstracting quality into a set of agreed-upon data rules and measuring the occurrences of quality violations provides the measurement in the methodology.