Blog: William McKnight

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A future with SOX-like requirements on corporate information

Perhaps the killer app for data quality improvement will come from the state.

Consider the numerous outside consumers of corporate information these days. It began a few years ago when data warehouses began being used for sharing information with suppliers, customers, prospects, vendors, etc. Why? Because they could. The data was there and some relative measure of data quality was being applied to the data, creating “good enough” data for those outside consumers. Though not first targets for the data warehouse, the data warehouse evolved to meet those needs. Coming on the heels of that is another potential level of consumer for not just data warehouse data, but potentially significant operational data – our government.

Now consider the last year of government solicitation of corporate data, much of it consumer-oriented and to the chagrin of civil libertarians and corporations alike. There are the public ones like internet search records and there are the company-by-company requests that information professional are working on fulfilling daily.

One day, if the government begins to treat corporate information as a state asset and grow frustrated with imperfect data quality in corporate submissions, we in information management could be living under a SOX-like environment.

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