Data Quality Is Not Optional

by Larissa T. Moss

More than a year ago, The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) estimated that data quality problems cost US businesses $600 billion each year. ¹ At the Information Quality Conference 2002 in Denver, Colorado, USA, a telecom company revealed that it recovered more than $100 million in "scrap and rework" costs, a bank claimed to have recovered $60 million, and a government agency said that it recovered $28.8 million on an initial investment of $3.75 million. Clearly, the private and public sectors are slowly realizing that data quality is not optional.