Data Quality

Stumbled upon this very well written article which talks about 'eveluating data capture process'
http://iaidq.info/publications/doc2/olson-2009-10.shtml

Well the post talks about a very interesting aspect in the data capture process and possible cause of bad health of data but at the same time I've noticed that in various instance the third party(information provider) is not willing to disclose certain information or deliberately provides inaccurate information like address,telephone no, SSN , Annual Salary etc. For instance a week back I received a call from a sales man from health insurance co. and he enquired about my current health insurance policy and offered his products as well. During the course of discussion he gathered several information like my current address, phone numbe, SSN etc.  Too avoide further call and offcourse for security reasons I declined to give correct information.  For sales man its not possible to validate all the information and the system which captures this information has got some data which is infected with wrong information.

Similarly there exists various other possible cause of bad data in the system and such 'cause' of bad data are inevitable. From pure data standpoint and based on nature of data , system should be able to provide a mean to classify various information which are pertinent for other systems or transaction before it can be used as an 'information' or considered as good data and also system should allow to configure rules using which system/data owner can be notified over the period about state of data in the system and also drilldown to such data and take corrective actions