What is data standardisation?

Data standardisation is a key part of ensuring data quality The consequences of poor data quality are significant to businesses, governments and society in general.

Poor quality data causes customer dissatisfaction, lost revenue and higher costs associated with additional time to reconcile data. Poor quality data can lead to a loss of credibility in a system and higher risks of non compliance with regulations. Poor quality data increases consumer costs, increases taxes, decreases shareholder value and can cause mission failure.

Data quality is dependent both on the quality of the data capture process and the processes used to store, maintain, transfer and present data.

ISO 8000 addresses data quality. ISO 8000 is concerned with:

• the principles of data quality;
• the characteristics of data that determine its quality;
• the processes to ensure data quality.

Data quality is achieved through the design of quality into the processes that create, maintain, deliver and present data to people in ways that support decision making.

ISO 8000 specifies requirements that can be checked by computer for the exchange, between organisations and systems, of master data that consists of characteristic data. It provides requirements for data quality, independent of syntax. It can be used with any other standard that specifies a formal syntax for a data set.

We have divided up the different ‘pieces’ that work together to create standardised data,

The data standards that we are working with…