Does it work well for a corporation if each department has their own data quality initiative? I call this the Data Quality Movement because each department knows they need to pay attention to data quality, but the corporation hasn’t decided on how to manage the quality of the data across the organization. So, we only worry about it for our department.

Centralized data quality would definitely come from the enterprise data management group, but most of these groups are not thinking about master data or corporate data. Do these people have time to manage a platform for data quality and data integration for the corporation? I think not! So what that means is that most of us are not ready for a corporate initiative, and are really not sure how to go about implementing such a ‘gorilla’.

Would it help if we had the following:

• Enterprise guidelines for departmental data management. For example, how do I use enterprise metadata about data, and how do I contribute my information for consumption?
• Enterprise software to manage the data quality and data integration. This would require a single platform for all the metadata. A platform that could eliminate re-creating the same data analysis metadata.
• Personnel who really understand the concepts of data management for the enterprise? This is the hard one, because we all think we understand how to do this, but have never really implemented data management for a large organization.
• A roadmap on how to ‘bite-off’ small chunks for implementation. As far as I can tell this will require management buy-in, and corporate participation. Corporate participation will require education, and adherence.

Ho hummmmmm, I am going to think about this some more tomorrow!