“Garbage in, garbage out” – we know that already, right? Well … what we know about information quality and what we do are not always in sync. Just for kicks, consider information quality through the lens of the industrial quality movement.
Looking down from 30,000 feet, the history of industrial quality goes something like this – Medieval Guild craftsmanship, then Industrial Revolution product inspection, and then the post-World War II focus on quality process management. It sounds arcane, until one remembers the 1980’s visceral fear that Japanese manufacturers were beating the pants off of U.S. manufacturing in terms of quality and value. Enter W. Edward Deming, who had been deeply influential in Japan’s post-war industrial recovery, and who became the evangelist for quality management practices in U.S. industry. Deming exhorted American management to adopt product and service quality as the driving force in all business practices.
What’s that got to do with Information Governance? It’s this – regardless of industry, in today’s world you’re actually in the information business. So, business quality increasingly means information quality.
Continue Reading Why govern your information? Reason #5: Bad information results in bad decisions.