Data Quality Standards

This is a helpful framework for explicitly thinking about data quality.

There have been plenty of frameworks for performance and data, see for example A Framework for Performance Information or the Code of Practice for Official Statistics.  However this one, although not the most recent, has a quite unique depth of focus on the quality of data as an end in itself, and the corporate standards to help achieve this.

A joint product from the collective auditing bodies of the UK.....


There are are two broad sets of considerations here.  The first are the characteristics which are displayed by good quality data.  These are the outcome of the second set of considerations, which concern the corporate arrangements which directly influence the quality of data, and are described as the standards.

So the characteristics of good quality data....


And those characteristics are delivered by these five standards, the corporate arrangements to secure good quality data, and summarised as follows....


And each of these standards have some exacting questions to test against, each of which are listed below.

Not surprisingly perhaps, the emphasis is on the governance and leaderships for data quality from which all else follows.  It's worth noting that this is not describing the leadership for data, rather the leadership specifically for data quality, and hence for which there might even be different leadership roles.

It might be helpful to consider policies-and-procedures and systems-and-processes more as a whole. Given these terms are not explicitly defined.  In simple terms, policies-and-procedures can be considered as the guidance, and the systems-and-processes the actual data activity.







And here's all those 30 questions as a wordcloud...so that data quality emerges from the predominant themes of management, reporting, staff, recording, proceedures....