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This chapter describes the differences between data and information, and how these relate to most business activities. We then consider the nature of the data asset and the generic life cycles of data and explain what is meant by the term ‘data quality’. Finally, we introduce the objectives of data quality management.

What ARE data?

Before going much further, there are some key terms and concepts that need to be defined and clarified to help ensure consistent understanding as you read this book.

The title of this book is Managing Data Quality, and, because they so often appear together when discussing the impact of computer technology on organisations, there are three important relevant terms that need to be clarified: data, information and knowledge.

When you have more than one data professional in a room, it is likely that there will be fierce debate about these terms. Even the ISO Online Browsing Platform1 (a place where all ISO definitions are gathered together) has numerous different definitions for these terms.

As the subject of this book is data, we can establish a solid foundation for our understanding by referring to the definition for data in ISO 8000-2:

Data: ‘reinterpretable representation of information in a formalized manner suitable for communication, interpretation, or processing’.

In the case of definitions for information and knowledge, making a choice is more controversial, not least because potential definitions often use the other two terms and any single collection of definitions becomes recursive. However, we believe the following key observations provide sufficient understanding to read the remainder of this book (while we leave more detailed discussion to others):

Use of the term ‘information’ suggests richness of meaning, and is typically taking an end-user view of the value of data to organisations to enable decision making.

1 The data asset

1 https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/