Summary: Data integrity refers to the completeness, accuracy, consistency, accessibility, and security of an organization’s data. On the other hand, data quality measures the level of data integrity and assesses the reliability and applicability of the data for its intended use. Both data integrity and data quality are crucial for data-driven organizations that rely on analytics and self-service data access. This article explores the concepts of data integrity and data quality, their benefits, and methods for improving data quality.

Data Integrity

Data integrity ensures the reliability of an organization’s data by implementing processes, rules, and standards for data collection, storage, access, editing, and usage. These processes and standards validate data, remove duplicates, provide data backups, safeguard data through access controls, and maintain audit trails for accountability and compliance. Data governance practices and tools help organizations maintain data integrity throughout the data lifecycle.

The Benefits of Data Integrity

An organization with high data integrity can recover data quickly in case of breaches or downtime, protect against unauthorized access and data modification, and achieve compliance more effectively. Moreover, good data integrity improves the accuracy of analytics, enhances decision-making, and benefits tasks like machine learning that rely on trustworthy and accurate data.

The Different Types of Data Integrity

There are two main categories of data integrity:

1. Physical data integrity: Focuses on protecting data wholeness, accessibility, and accuracy during storage or transit, safeguarding data against natural disasters, power outages, cyberattacks, and human errors.
2. Logical data integrity: Ensures data consistency and completeness when accessed by various stakeholders and applications. This involves preventing duplication, dictating data storage and usage, preserving data formats, and meeting organization-specific needs.

How Data Integrity Differs from Data Security

Data security is a subcomponent of data integrity and involves measures to prevent unauthorized data access or manipulation. Data security contributes to strong data integrity by protecting the data from breaches, attacks, power outages, or service interruptions.

The Consequences of Poor Data Integrity

Poor data integrity, resulting from human errors, transfer errors, malicious acts, insufficient security, or hardware malfunctions, can negatively impact organizations. It leads to poor data quality, compromised data security, and may cause productivity losses, revenue decline, and reputational damage.

Data Quality

Data quality is the measure of data integrity. It assesses a dataset’s accuracy, completeness, consistency, validity, uniqueness, and timeliness to determine its usefulness and effectiveness for a specific business use case.

How to Determine Data Quality

Data quality analysts assess datasets using the dimensions mentioned above and assign an overall score. High-quality data ranks well in every dimension, indicating reliability and trustworthiness. Data quality rules, also known as data validation rules, help organizations measure and maintain high-quality data.

The Benefits of Good Data Quality

Good data quality improves efficiency by enabling easy access and analysis of consistent datasets. It increases data value by uncovering insights that might have otherwise been ignored. It also enhances collaboration, decision-making, compliance, and overall employee and customer experiences.

The Six Dimensions of Data Quality

Data quality analysts evaluate datasets based on the following dimensions or data characteristics:

1. Accuracy: Is the data provably correct and reflects real-world knowledge?
2. Completeness: Does the data include all relevant and available information without missing elements?
3. Consistency: Do corresponding data values match across locations and environments?
4. Validity: Is the data collected in the correct format for its intended use?
5. Uniqueness: Is the data duplicated or overlapping with other data entries?
6. Timeliness: Is the data up to date and readily available when needed?

How to Improve Data Quality

Organizations use various methods to improve data quality, including:

• Data profiling: Auditing datasets to uncover errors, inconsistencies, gaps, and duplications.
• Data cleansing: Remediating data quality issues and deduplicating datasets.
• Data standardization: Conforming data assets into a consistent format to ensure completeness and compatibility.
• Geocoding: Adding location metadata to track data origin and comply with geographic data standards.
• Matching or linking: Identifying and resolving duplicate or redundant data.
• Data quality monitoring: Continuously evaluating data quality based on the six dimensions.
• Batch and real-time validation: Deploying data validation rules to ensure adherence to standards.
• Master data management: Creating a centralized data registry to catalog and track all organizational data.

IBM offers integrated data quality and governance capabilities to ensure organizations have access to trusted and high-quality data. These capabilities include data profiling, data cleansing, data monitoring, data matching, and data enrichment. IBM’s data governance solution helps organizations establish automated, metadata-driven foundations for data quality. Data observability and automated data lineage capabilities, achieved through a partnership with Manta, enable IBM to help clients detect and resolve issues in data pipelines.

FAQs

1. What is data integrity?

Data integrity refers to the completeness, accuracy, consistency, accessibility, and security of an organization’s data. It ensures the reliability of the data.

2. What is data quality?

Data quality measures the level of data integrity and assesses the usefulness and effectiveness of the data for a specific business use case. It evaluates factors such as accuracy, completeness, consistency, validity, uniqueness, and timeliness.

3. Why is data integrity important?

Data integrity is important because it ensures the reliability and trustworthiness of data, leading to accurate analytics, informed decision-making, compliance, and improved business outcomes.

4. How can organizations improve data quality?

Organizations can improve data quality through data profiling, data cleansing, data standardization, geocoding, matching or linking, data quality monitoring, batch and real-time validation, and master data management.

5. What tools does IBM offer to improve data quality?

IBM offers a range of integrated data quality and governance capabilities, including data profiling, data cleansing, data monitoring, data matching, and data enrichment. IBM’s data governance solution helps establish automated, metadata-driven foundations for data quality.