Process

Objective

To ensure that errors and omissions impacting the quality of data within source records are reported through an incident management system to provide assurance on resolution, enable analysis of incidents and identify improvement opportunities through staff training and / or systems configuration.

Benefit

Having in place a process for capturing data quality incidents ensures visibility and facilitates identification of both persistent and one-off data quality issues, thereby enabling their resolution. It allows organisations to inform primary or secondary data users of issues that require remedial action and provides the starting point for root cause analysis of data quality weaknesses.  Outcomes from such analyses provide valuable sources of improvement opportunities to address data quality concerns related to processes, staff training and systems configuration.  Incident reporting can also be used as a measure of the effectiveness of organisations’ data quality processes.

Best practice

Data Quality issues should be subject to the same incident reporting procedures as all other incident types within the organisations.  Data quality incidents should be recorded under a dedicated category within the incident system to allow for separate reporting and analysis.  Staff should be made aware of what constitutes a data quality incident and how to differentiate this from other record management or systems related incidents.  The incident system should, where available, have defined incident escalation routes for data quality incidents and the ability to provide incident reports for review.  This should be through a dedicated Data Quality Forum or Steering Group (see above) that can identify underlying data quality weaknesses and address them through improvements to related policies, systems controls or training.