"Data Quality Tools - Horses for Courses"
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Tom Breur
August 2009 Intro Data quality programs have both technical and organizational aspects to them. Organizational facets like accountabilities and business alignment are crucial to make producing quality the default. The technical components in a data quality program deal with deduplication, data profiling, fuzzy matching of records, etc. A whole raft of skills are needed to support the “backroom process” of data creation. Data can be manipulated for a data warehouse (DWH), operational data store (ODS), or any other process that relies on integrated data. Given the immature state of the market for data quality tools, and the lack of business results in an overcrowded market, vendor consolidation was a “natural” outcome. So in the recent past we’ve seen vendors come and go. Unfortunately, this has made offerings less transparent. One wonders whether vendors consciously pursue this, or whether lack of strategic vision has kept them from displaying their value proposition more clearly. In some cases following an acquisition, vendors may need some time to work out how to rationalize product overlaps. |
