News >> In The Know

IT must `walk the beaten path`

Thursday, 13 March 2008 00:00 Written by Iain Scott
Changing the culture of IT organisations by applying the management lessons already learned in other sectors is becoming essential THE IT INDUSTRY needs to apply the quality management lessons already learned in other sectors since the 1920s, says of Deloitte Consulting. One of these lessons is that achieving data quality involves organisational commitment and this is non-negotiable, as data quality management is not just an IT problem. It involves a thorough understanding of business processes.

"I don`t want to disappoint anybody, but fixing data quality is going to take you long rs, not months," he said at ITWeb`s BI Conference in Bryanston recently.

"You may fix your top five issues that will address 80% of the overall problem in the first year, but you`re certainly not going to fix everything in year one. Especially large corporations - it takes two, three years before it becomes embedded in the culture of your organisation, and that`s really where you want to be, otherwise you will consistently be fixing," he told delegates.

"If you`re not serious about it, don`t spend R5 million on the tools.

"We see many clients on a regular basis where they tell us, `Oh, we have the tools. We`ve got different tools because when this one didn`t work we bought the next one, and it still hasn`t fixed the data quality problem.`"

Swanepoel said there was a link between data quality and business processes. "It is fundamentally true. Nine out of 10 data quality issues are related to a business process that`s not functioning properly." He added that identifying the root causes of data quality issues was essential to addressing the matter.

Swanepoel says quality control is not unique to IT, and much can be gained from the lessons other industries, particularly manufacturing, have already learned. Formal quality control principles have been in place in the manufacturing sector at least since the 1920s and modern-day interpretations of total quality management still used tools derived from those early days.

Tags: Itweb  Bi  Conference