The Credera Brief | 4 Common Causes of Data Quality Issues

In this edition of The Credera Brief, Credera's Chief Data Scientist Vincent Yates shares the four most common causes of bad data.

All companies, no matter the size, likely suffer from bad data and issues with data quality. The existence of bad data is well understood, but the reasons for it are less clear. 

The quality of your data directly impacts business growth and outcomes. The existence of bad data often leads to mistakes, issues, unwanted expenses, and erodes trust. It’s imperative to understand what’s causing the existence of poor data quality.  

In our experience, we’ve found four common causes of bad data:

1. The organization wasn’t set up to scale with the data – The amount of data in an organization is monotonically increasing, yet most companies don’t have the core data architecture to support this growth. This can often cause data to faulter. 

2. Errors propagating in non-linear ways – The massive growth of data and different data streams makes it difficult, if not impossible, to predict how changes to upstream sources may impact downstream data quality.  

3. Naturally occurring abnormalities – Data that might seem inaccurate could have reasonable explanations, but most organizations can’t globally codify these abnormalities. This leads to bad insights from poorly classified abnormalities.

4. Tension between individual needs and enterprise uniformity of data – Bad data can proliferate when different user groups change the data for their user needs and don’t communicate that with the rest of the organization. This causes tension between users that creates inconsistencies in the data quality. 

Understanding the reasons for data quality issues is half the battle. To address these issues, watch our next Credera Brief video on XXX here.

To learn more about how to address the common causes of poor data quality, visit us at credera.com.

The Credera Brief 

At Credera, we believe the toughest business challenges are best solved by a team—a team who works together to share knowledge to accomplish their goals. 

We created The Credera Brief series to distill trends and ideas from Credera leaders and experts. These short-form videos share different insights and perspectives across the topic spectrum from MarTech and innovation to strategy and technology.  

You can find the complete series on our YouTube page, or reach out to findoutmore@credera.com to continue the conversation.

• Data
• Data & Analytics
• Data Collection
• Data Governance
• Data Integrity
• Data Quality
• Data Science
• Customer Data Platform
• Database