Data Quality Dashboards

in Support of Data Governance

White Paper

Talend White Paper

Data Quality Dashboards in Support of Data Governance

Table of contents
New Data Management Trends .......................................................... 3
Data Quality Dashboards .................................................................. 3
Understanding Important Metrics ....................................................... 4
Take a Baseline and Monitor............................................................................... 5
Build a Business-focused Score Card .............................................................. 5
Monitor Metrics over Time ................................................................................... 6
Market the Importance of Data Quality .......................................................... 7
Tools to communicate ........................................................................................... 7
Data Quality Dashboards ..................................................................................... 8
Talend Data Quality ......................................................................... 8
Data Profiling ............................................................................................................ 9
Reporting .................................................................................................................... 9
Data Quality Portal ................................................................................................. 9
Features .................................................................................................................... 10
Cleansing and Standardization ........................................................................ 10
Unified Data Management Platform ....................................................11

Page 2 of 11

Data Quality Dashboards in Support of Data Governance

Talend White Paper

New Data Management Trends

In past years, you may have sought data quality tools in reaction to
problems stemming from data failures. Your projects might have
included a desire to improve revenue, mitigating a loss in productivity,
or even ensuring the company was in compliance with industry laws and
regulations. Even something as simple loading a target data source may
have sent you off to purchase technical solutions to address the data
quality problem or risk project failure. The responsibility was on IT to
solve the problem and make the target application run right.
Today, a newer trend is emerging when it comes to data management.
More common today is a data governance approach where time and
energy are spent on fixing the processes that allow flawed data to be
introduced into an environment. In this approach, you rather seek to
isolate the cause and eliminate the source of the introduction of flawed
data. In companies where internal and external data is constantly being
merged to form operational data stores and data warehouses, it makes
more sense to not only address data failures, but to proactively monitor
data and report the current state of data quality back to the origin of
the data. This new data governance approach works on cross-functional
problem solving and process improvement, not relegation of data
management to IT.

Data Quality Dashboards

To this end, the emerging technology of data quality dashboards are
becoming more and more important. Organizations pull together data
governance strategies and these tools to:

Understand what metrics are important to the organization

Take a baseline of DQ metrics

Monitor metrics over time

Report the metrics so that cross-functional teams can

understand the impact
Page 3 of 11

Data Quality Dashboards in Support of Data Governance

Talend White Paper

Measure the impact and market the importance of data

management

Youll notice that the list did not include fixing data quality issues with
tools, although this often remains a necessity. The emphasis in this
approach is on modifying peoples attitude and improving processes.
The strategy is more about setting up data quality policies and setting
up control processes based on data quality rules. The tactics are to
automate monitoring and reporting of data quality metrics and
communicate knowledge about the value of the data. The tactics
include empowering business users with the ability to determine how
best the data can be used to meet their own business needs.

Understanding Important Metrics

The first step in employing such a strategy is to understand key quality
indicators (KQI) for your organization. Since every organization has
unique data management challenges, you will have to reach out to your
co-workers here and communicate. Communication is key to your
success in data governance. If you were to sit down and work for a day
in the billing center, call center or purchasing agent job, for example,
people there will see that you understand them and care about their
processes. The first, most important task you can do is to understand
critical business processes in your organization.
This will begin to develop your story about return on investment for
justifying the funding of an improvement project, necessary data
quality tools, master data management strategies and more.
The most important metrics could revolve around any of the following
key components:

increasing revenue

lowering costs

reducing risks (compliance)

Page 4 of 11

Data Quality Dashboards in Support of Data Governance

Talend White Paper

avoiding data disasters

competing effectively in the market

meeting the organizations objectives.

Dont be afraid to ask questions, take notes and understand the data
management challenges of your business associates.

Take a Baseline and Monitor

Having gathered potential data- quality metrics and business impact in
the previous step, next it is time to take a baseline measurement. As
part of the source system analysis, a baseline of each source system
should be captured and stored as well as how multiple systems conform
to expected metrics or business rules. In some cases, it will make sense
to look not only at each source system in isolation, but across systems.
Employ advanced profiling for comprehensive column and attribute
analysis. Identify potential problems within structured data fields such
as dates, postal codes, product codes, customer codes, addresses or any
attributes that should conform to a particular format and structure.
Configure custom data- quality rules, and flag any attributes that do not
conform.
When youre done with the analysis, you will have a very good idea of
the challenges you face in integrating data and the information
necessary to develop designs that address the challenges proactively.

Build a Business-focused Score Card

Its important to aggregate the information you get from a data
profiling tool into business metrics. A simple non-aggregate score is
usually rather meaningless. If we show that a certain percentage of all
fields are nulls, for example, the number is of no use there is no
context. You cant say whether it is good or bad, and you cant make

Page 5 of 11

Talend White Paper

Data Quality Dashboards in Support of Data Governance

any decisions based on this information. Practitioners aggregate those
scores into business value metrics. The technical metrics combined with
the business pain observed allow business users and technical users to
collaborate to govern data.
Most data profiling tools and scorecards give you very technical metrics
by default. More and more data profiling tools being developed today
allow you to aggregate the technical scores into business metrics, but
since a tool cant natively and unthinkingly know your business, its up
to you and the business stakeholders in the room to give it meaning.
A common example of this might be to create an ability to contact
score. Evaluate the completeness and validity of e-mail, name, address,
and telephone number. Then create some simple logic around it that
fits your business. It may be that having a name and address is enough
to contact your customer. If an address is invalid, then both phone and
e-mail are required by your data governance committee. Those records
that have invalid addresses, and either an invalid e-mail or phone
cannot be contacted by data governance rule. This ability to contact
metric is easier to follow for your team.

Monitor Metrics over Time

Data may be coming into your databases via a call center or data entry.
It may be coming into a centralized location from data feed or thirdparty vendors. Data quality dashboards allow you to keep an eye on
data anomalies by constantly checking if the data meets business
specifications. Dashboards offer attractive charts and graphs on the
status of data compliance. It shows your key performance indicators and
trends conformity.
Todays modern businesses use data quality dashboards to monitor and
report feeds from the companys many locations. When you want to
ensure that client information was properly being entered into your
database, profiling it and comparing it to the baseline. With

Page 6 of 11

Data Quality Dashboards in Support of Data Governance

Talend White Paper

dashboards, your headquarters could report back to the individual data

stewards and notify them when they get the data right and when they
had allowed anomalies to get into the system. This feedback loop works
to continually improved data quality, train data stewards at new
locations and improve billing efficiency. Dashboards are also a great
way to make your people smarter about data governance; they will help
you achieve cleaner, more useful information.

Market the Importance of Data Quality

Its unfortunate, but people have the tendency to think that
responsibility for information quality starts with someone else, not
themselves. In truth, we all know that information quality is the
responsibility of everyone in the organization, from the call center
operators to the sales force to IT and beyond.

Tools to communicate
Tools that supplement your in-person meetings can track progress,
promote the power of data governance, help you take on difficult
challenges and keep a record of successes. The good news is that there
are some fantastic software tools that can support communication.

Workflow - With workflow tools, teams can manage the

processes and coordination of the data governance team.

Wikis - In your data governance projects, you can use a Wiki to

document processes in a data governance projects, and have
an open online dialogue about risks and challenges in the
project.

Blogs - A blog allows for one persons perspective on the data

governance project, but readers can leave comments and links
to their own blogs. Blogs can educate and inform data
governance groups, and they can use them to debate
unresolved issues or to continue discussions between
meetings.
Page 7 of 11

Data Quality Dashboards in Support of Data Governance

Talend White Paper

Data Quality Dashboards

Knowing where your organization stands with regard to data quality is
essential for running an efficient and profitable business. Talend Data
Quality is designed to allow companies to share the vision of data
quality across the entire company. In addition to its profiling, cleansing,
standardization and matching functions, Talend Data Quality provides
customizable, web-based data quality reports and scorecards as well
the ability to export them in popular formats like Adobe Acrobat,
Microsoft Excel and XML. Business users and IT users can team up in
formulating processes that keeps data clean in the enterprise. It
extends the dynamic reporting capabilities of Talend Open Profiler to
help organizations monitor data quality metrics and support data
governance initiatives.

Talend Data Quality

With Talend Data Quality, organizations have a single, powerful solution
for reporting and monitoring the quality of their data across the
enterprise, allowing them to easily align the data quality facets of a
data governance program. This alignment improves processes and
communication on your valuable data assets. With Talend Data Quality
Page 8 of 11

Data Quality Dashboards in Support of Data Governance

Talend White Paper

data quality scorecards can be distributed to the data source owners to

track data quality improvements over time and drive compliance with
enterprise-wide data quality standards.

Data Profiling
Data profiling provides both an evaluation of your current state of data
quality and measurement of it over time. You can generate informative
reports and share key data quality metrics with your team the first
step in solving data quality issues.

Reporting
Talend Data Quality includes report generation where data stewards can
leverage the data profiling results to create predefined reports that
watch for the violation of data quality thresholds. The reports can be
generated in Adobe Acrobat and other formats and communicated via email, wiki or intranet site.

Data Quality Portal

Talend Data Quality delivers customized, key quality indicators to a
web-based portal where teams can collaborate on the process of
Page 9 of 11

Data Quality Dashboards in Support of Data Governance

Talend White Paper

improving data quality across the enterprise. Data Quality Portal

provides an easy-to-use, browser-based view into key data quality
metrics. The portal opens up the issue of data quality to a broader
audience in your organization, fostering positive change around the way
your company manages data.

Features

Create customizable web-based dashboards that display

critical information on data quality processes needed by
business users

Provide personalized, default dashboards for different levels

within the organization that include alerts, data views, and
links

Access control so that users and managers only see the

dashboards they need for their job

Alerts that update in real time so youre always on top of data

quality issues

Track progress against realistic targets on an attribute-byattribute basis

Export reports in popular formats like PDF, XLS, XML and

HTML.

Cleansing and Standardization

If you need it, Talend Data Quality has powerful tools for repairing and
cleansing data as well. Talend Data Quality allows you to use internal or
external reference data to set the standards for values, regular
expressions to set standards for data shape and size.
Set up cleansing processes using a wide range of dedicated data
integration and quality components. Nicknames or addresses are for
example easily normalized and standardized using the dedicated
components. These dedicated components, such as name & address
cleansing components, fuzzy deduplication components, third-party
Page 10 of 11

Talend White Paper

Data Quality Dashboards in Support of Data Governance

address validation & standardization services are natively available in
Talend Data Quality.

Unified Data Management Platform

Talend is an open source data management company offering complete,
end-to-end data management tools. Data Quality is the foundation for
building your complete data management strategy, but data
management is not limited to Data Quality. Data management requires
that you be able to access the data no matter what source system,
manage metadata and provide the transformations that come with Data
Integration. Data management is also about process change, the kinds
of changes you make as you move toward Master Data Management and
a more mature data governance strategy. Talend tools provide an easy
path as your data management needs mature.

Page 11 of 11