Managing Data Quality

3 THE IMPACT OF PEOPLE ON DATA QUALITY

This chapter introduces the effect of people and their behaviours on data quality. We discuss the ‘Data Zoo’ concept, to illustrate the generic behaviours that people exhibit towards data quality, and then consider how behaviours are influenced when individuals are working as part of a team. Finally, we consider some of the factors that encourage particular behaviour types.

Arguably, the root cause of any data quality issue is a people issue:

• Human error or lack of diligence can be the cause for poor quality in data that are manually entered or configured by customers or employees.
• The lack of ability to quickly change system configurations could be viewed as a ‘software problem’, yet people were involved ...