Sponsorship for Data Quality.

Data Quality initiatives always face the challenge. There are few myths one has to clear on this. A data quality program does not take much effort, to establish a business case. You can go into the root causes of the issues you faced earlier, and also run some queries on the database to bring about the issues. Surely your conviction on the need of a data quality program must have come from your sensing of the situation. Secondly, you should try to quantify the benefit. Lastly, you can make the a business unit or CFO as the mentor or sponsor of this initiative. If he/she takes the ownership it will be easier for you, as corporate audit has a direct access to CEO.

A data quality program has to be sponsored and owned by business. One of the reasons for lesser reception to business case is that business may feel it to be an IT subject. With ownership being given to business, they become more engaged on this subject.

For quantification, there is not better source than business itself. Once you have enough basis (by running queries and checks, and also by gathering the list of business issues linked to Data Quality), you can engage business on positive impacts if the data quality issues are resolved.

There are two stages of business case:

• Initial business case to get a go-ahead on data quality analysis (as that also may need some investment). This is just like getting a go ahead for initial project scoping.
• Detailed business case to get a go-ahead for Data Quality program (in other words- to get the cheque signed by the sponsor). This is going to be a more extensive exercise.

Few other points to Note:

• You need to be careful that business not only understands the cost of quality program from IT perspective, but also all the change management as well as the effort they have to put on the business side (like changing processes, additional manual controls..).
• One can engage a third party consultant or specialist. This may be given a greater level credibility to the business-case. The external view will also share on how the competition and other companies are managing their data quality program.