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Its pedantic to say that data quality is nothing else, but data adhering to the defined business rules. The core value addition of an information manager is to have the business rules, which can bring a system closest to the real world.
Business object completeness rules and accuracy rules
Business rules definition for completeness states on how a business object like a voucher, a job order and a bill will be termed as complete. You can make the list of all business objects in your data model, and for each of those business objects, ensure that the completeness and accuracy definitions are in place. For example, a bill has to have the mandatory components of bill number, customer ID, bill date, billing address, bill total… Yes you may say that this is what a database design is.
Once you review your database and application design from this route you may find some surprises. Typically a database and an application designer looks at the business object bill (say) as a combination of tables and attributes. When you see it from a business view new business rules emerge, which are beyond the data structures..
Conditional/Derived Value Rules
For the fields, which have their values dependent on other fields, it will be a good idea to first look at all possible values the 'source' fields can take. Thereafter, one can go about defining the values of the target field. Typically the commission calculations, the status of delinquencies, the segmentation of customers etc. all are derived out of base business information. The derived value business rules for each entity need to be defined likewise.
Business Consistency Rules definition
If the customer has not done any transaction in last six months, he has to be 'inactive' OR if a customer has done more than 10000USD average balance in last three months, he is 'power customer'. If the balance in customer credit card is 0, he cannot be 'Delinquent'.
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