It is here that the project might benefit from discussions with a team composed of a business analyst, warehouse administrator, data quality steward, and management to identify key business needs for specific data and objectives. It is this team that determines the scope of the project, the accuracy required, and the applications. Data can be stored in a variety of mediums from smallest spreadsheets buried within a marketer's office to operational data maintained on corporate mainframes. The team should review how the data is collected. This helps determine how complete or inconsistent the data source is to start.
More people entering data tend to create more inconsistencies.
For example, a client in the transportation industry wants to accurately report cost information from the vendor-tracking database. Staff in this company want to know how much money was paid to each vendor. However, since many different field representatives make purchases and enter data in the database, the same vendors appear under different name variations within the vendor tracking database. Whenever the staff generate the Cost by Vendor report, a vendor could show up in several lines and display incomplete expenditure summations, rather than one line entry and one complete summation per vendor. 2001 SAS Institute Inc. All Rights Reserved.