What are the key metrics to evaluate your data quality? It’s a fact that in order to measure the quality of your data and track the effectiveness of the same to initiate quality improvement measures, you need one fundamental thing, ‘the data.’
Data is considered to be the essential asset of any enterprise which wants to respond to the customer or user needs as its major objective. Keep reading this article to understand the type of data and the metrics that organizations can use to measure your data quality.
What’s data quality, and why is it important?
Data quality refers to a data set’s ability to serve its intended purpose at the fundamental level. This intended purpose may change from case to case. For a retail store, this may be to upkeep its consumers’ data and their buying initiatives. For a research organization, the objective of maintaining big data may be to analyze a huge volume of historical data to identify some patterns. For banking operations, data may help to aid in personalized online banking for their customers. In any of these use cases, compromised data quality will spoil the purpose and never let you achieve your intended goals.
There are a lot of time-tested strategies that you can adopt to improve the quality of your data. However, as the database administration scenario is fast changing, the DBAs and programmers need to adapt those advanced approaches to respond to an increasing number of challenges in terms of data quality. Whichever approach you take to improve your enterprise data’s data quality, you need to be sure that you are using the most appropriate ways to assess the effectiveness of your quality control measures. If not done well, you may be simply investing your time and money into the data quality, which may not pay off.
Metrics to measure the data quality
In real-time practice, quality assessment for your data may look a bit strange for beginners. So get the help of a professional to help you out. Select what is best suited to your requirements and research what is best. Below, we discuss some of the metrics that will help an organization measure its data quality efforts.
| Definition of metrics | How to calculate data quality |
| Data to Errors ratio | You need to check how many errors are there concerning the actual size of the data set.
Just divide the number of errors with the total number of items in the DB.
|
| Empty values | This metric indicates the information missing from a given data set. Just count the number of empty fields with the given data sets.
|
| Data Transformation error rate | To identify how many errors pop up when trying to convert information from one format to another.
Check out how often the data tend to fail during the time of conversion.
|
| Email Bounce Rates | When you execute an e-mail campaign from the database, what percentage of the total recipients do not receive the email in their inbox.
Divide the bounced mail count with the total number of emails sent and multiply it with 100 to get the percentage. |
| Data Time-to-Value
|
Check out how long it takes for you to get the actual value from the input information.
You have to custom define what ‘value’ means in terms of your organizational goals and then measure it against the time taken to achieve the same. |
Let us now evaluate these in detail. For any further support in this regard, you can approach RemoteDBA.com experts who can provide any service related to reliable remote database administration.
1. Data to errors ratio
This is one of the top-quality metrics in terms of data integrity. It will let you keep track of the known errors like missing, incomplete, or redundant data entries in the given data set corresponding to its size. If you only find a fewer number of errors as the size of your database increases, it means your data quality is constantly improving.
2. Count of empty values
Empty values depict that information is missing or recorded in the wrong fields in the database. This is an easy way to track data quality issues for your business and other enterprises. With this, you can effectively quantify how many fields are there within the given data set and monitor how this number is changing over time.
3. The error rate on data transformation
You need to analyze the problems related to data transformation. During data transformation, you are trying to take a set of data in a specific format and convert it to a different format. Often, it may raise some quality concerns. By keeping track of the data, transformation fails, and issues, you will have a better insight into your data quality.
4. Mail bounce rate
If you run mail marketing or e-mail newsletter campaign for your business, then poor data quality may tamper its benefits too. You have to keep a watch on how many your mails are getting bounced, which directly relates to your prospect’s data’s incompetence. There may be errors, missing data, or outdated data as a reason for email bouncing, which you have to try and correct.
5. Time-to-value of your data
It is essential to calculate how long it will take for your database administration process to derive the desired results from a given data set. This is a key metric when it comes to measuring the overall quality of your data. Even though several factors may affect the metric of time-to-value, the major cause of delayed time-to-value is primarily the quality of data, which slows down the output of your efforts.
Even when you keep a close eye on the above metrics, more things make sense while measuring data quality, which may largely depend on the specific business goals you want to achieve. We have discussed above just a few guidelines that you need to consider to measure the data quality. There are many advanced database management tools, too, which will help you keep track of your data quality and ensure compliance with the set modalities.
You should also consider looking into Master Data Management (or MDM)
Master data management is a technology-enabled discipline in which business and Information Technology work together to ensure the uniformity, accuracy, stewardship, semantic consistency and accountability of the enterprise’s official shared master data assets. Make sure that you understand the Meaning of MDM before you implement it.
Watch this space for updates in the Hacks category on Running Wolf’s Rant.
Like what you just read? Buy us a coffee or Subscribe To Our Newsletter to stay in the loop.
Feel free to explore our website, check out our Featured Articles or scroll down to see the articles that are related to this article below. We've been around since 2008, so there's plenty of content.
Looking for a gift for that special person in your life? Check out Netflorist.co.za, South Africa's top online florist and gift service. They offer flowers, gifts, and hampers for all occasions AND reliable nationwide delivery.
