Information policy principles rest on fundamental democratic principles. Stewardship encourages policies that regard government information as a public good. Usefulness principle promotes policies that encourage the innovative use of government information to improve the quality and lower the cost of government services. Policies should ensure good quality and ready availability of data for action. Data Data issues are the biggest challenges to government agencies transitioning from legacy, stovepipe systems to integrated systems.
Data quality goes beyond 'clean data' to evaluation of data for 'fitness for use'.
Data that is not used cannot be correct for very long. Laws of data quality apply equally to data and meta data. Lack of data standards is a significant barrier to information use. Meta data is critical when dealing with data quality and data standards. Understanding the complex program environments within which the data is used is as important as the quality of the data.