
Chapter 5 Assessing Information Quality 237
Summary Charts and Pareto Diagrams for identifying Defect Types,
such as Inaccurate Values in the various data elements in one Pareto,
Missing Data in another Pareto, and Invalid Values, or Non-conformance
to Business Rules in yet another Pareto. See Figure 5-28 for an example
of a summary chart.
Completeness Accuracy Duplicates
40.0%
35.0%
30.0%
25.0%
20.0%
15.0%
10.0%
5.0%
0.0%
Records with
incomplete fields
10.0%
28.4%
Fields
incomplete
3.0%
6.3%
Records
with errors
8.0%
20.0%
Total errors
2.0%
Duplicate
records
15.0%
37.2%
Temp Quality Goal
Summary IQ Assessment Results
Assessed Defects
Figure 5-28: Summary Chart of Critical IQ Characteristics
Summary charts should be exploded into meaningful Pareto Diagrams, by
error type or data elements in error, as illustrated in Figure 5-29.
The number at the top of each column represents the number of defects of
that type found. The cumulative percentage graph represents the cumulative
percent of errors of each type from most frequent to least frequent.
A more useful Pareto, however, is the “Impact Pareto,” where you weight
the different defect types by actual cost of process failure downstream and
Information Scrap and Rework, or by relative estimated impact on process
failure downstream.
Figure 5-30 is an illustration of an Impact Pareto Diagram by costs or impact
of error type.
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