Technology Record - Issue 22: Autumn 2021

96 www. t e c h n o l o g y r e c o r d . c om I NT E R V I EW D ata can help businesses reduce costs, main- tain productivity and better meet their cus- tomers’ needs. But it can also go bad. “Data entry typos are the simplest issues, along with entering the right data but in the wrong field,” says Steve Farr, vice president of solu- tions and marketing at Experian Data Quality. “Beyond this we have more knotty problems – data that has been entered by customers directly and may conflict with what you already know. I am “Steve”, but also “Stephen”, I have multiple email addresses and don’t remember which one I used last time, these sorts of things. “These may be honest oversights or allowable variances, but what if I am deliberately trying to hide my identity? I may be a previous bad debtor or even a fraudster.” Data can also go bad because it is duplicated or goes out of date. “Duplicate records occur for many reasons associated with data acquisition, and the problems of identifying and then resolv- ing duplicates can be very complex. Then people get married, move home and of course pass away, which means the data becomes incorrect,” says Farr. “Every year your data loses value if you don’t maintain it. “We do a lot of work, with individual users and the industry as a whole, quantifying the prob- lem. We commonly find databases with dupli- cate records over 10 per cent of the total.” A data quality firewall can help businesses make better and more accurate decisions based on up-to-date data that reflects the real world When data goes bad BY E L LY YAT E S - ROB E R T S “72 per cent of businesses said better data would have improved their response to the pandemic”