‘Accounting’ for data quality in enterprise systems

Organisations are facing ever more diverse challenges in managing their enterprise systems as emerging technologies bring both added complexities as well as opportunities to the way they conduct their business. Underpinning this ever-increasing volatility is the importance of having quality data to provide information to make those important enterprise-wide decisions. Numerous studies suggest that many organisations are not paying enough attention to their data and that a major cause of this is their failure to measure its quality and value and/or evaluate the costs of having poor data. This study proposes an integrated framework that organisations can adopt as part of their financial and management control processes to provide a mechanism for quantifying data problems, costing potential solutions and monitoring the on-going costs and benefits, to assist them in improving and then sustaining the quality of their data.