// Raghavendra Ganiga

thanks for your comments. I agree with you that to push IQ/DQ ‘over the top’ in industry today we need to stop piddling around with it as a ‘silo’ activity and link it directly to core competencies in business and embed it within priority corporate initiatives.

The other big thing that needs to happen is that we need to stop thinking and talking about Information Quality as a ‘technology’ issue and talk about it in real business terms.

These are both themes that I’ve written about in the IAIDQ Quarterly newsletter in the past few years (see http://www.iaidq.org/main/newsletters.shtml for details)

And yes, the volume of queries I receive from agencies quizzing me for DQ contacts has increased noticeably this year in particular so perhaps we are on the brink.

I still think though that we are some way from creating DQ roles that can actually enforce change, in my experience most organisations still pay lip-service to DQ until a major business initiative flounders due to DQ.

You will increasingly see the archetypal ‘name and address’ cleansing type DQ projects in many organisations nowadays but its still rare to see a DQ officer who has real ‘clout’.

I think one area the DQ industry has to improve is in the ability to demonstrate business impact from DQ.

Far too many consultants take a lofty view of the failings of the business community to address DQ. The reason the business ‘doesnt get it’ is often because they can’t visualise what ‘it’ actually is. Many of the business cases for DQ improvement are not really credible from a business perspective.

For example trying to convince an organisation that calculating customer lifetime value as a marker for improving DQ is pointless in todays high-churn marketplace yet it features prominently in several DQ texts.

There are much more powerful and simpler ways to demonstrate the need for DQ in a business context and I think as the DQ industry merges DQ strategies with other ongoing corporate initiatives we will see a much wider take-up.