In my last blog entry I described my Mother Moment, when--in the midst of advising a client to consider a data quality tool--I reminded myself of my mother. Several glasses of Pinot Noir later, I realized that this could be a lot worse, my mother being one of those existential "everyone's on their own journey" sort of people.

But such a permissive attitude about data quality might not cut the mustard. Like in the case of the client I talked about last time. Five people managing the company's item master and doing the dirty work of manual data reconciliation. So when a spare part for an assembly line comes in and no one recognizes it, these five people have to name it, define it, standardize it, input it, and perform brute-force error correction--whether or not anyone ever needs that part again.

There is, of course, software that can do this automatically. So people don't have to name new products: It's automated. You don't have to dedicate a team to look for data anomalies: it's automated. You don't have to hire a consultant (herewith, a hearty wink of the eye to my Baseline colleagues) to perform a protracted metadata inventory of your systems of record: it's automated. You don't have to match conflicting records: it's automated. You get the drift.

There's usually a moment at every company in which some visionary manager or enterprising practitioner realizes that the manual effort, consensus-building, and political wrangling might be reduced with the acquisition of a data quality tool, and he or she could be freed up to do other things, like actually analyze the data to make important business decisions.

Sometimes that moment is a business user standing in your doorway swearing he will never touch the application again as long as the data is bad. Sometimes it's an executive who "has heard some buzz" that the data can't be trusted, so neither can you. Sometimes it's just too much unnecessary, repeated, tiresome, unstimulating, automate-able work. Maybe this describes you and your company? If so, the moment may have indeed arrived.

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