Improving Social and Economic Outcomes: The Value of Data Quality at the Federal Level

Enhancing federal performance with reliable and accurate data.

Analyst Perspective

Leveraging data quality to drive federal-level efficiency and effectiveness

Understanding the value of data quality at the federal level is essential. High-quality data is vital for informed decision making, effective policy making, and achieving the desired positive social and economic outcomes. Accurate and reliable data can help identify trends, address challenges, and measure the impact of government programs.

Data quality reduces errors and improves efficiency, since accurate and consistent data reduces the need for manual checks and corrections, freeing up valuable time and resources for other critical tasks. It also improves transparency and accountability. Collecting and sharing high-quality data provides greater transparency to the public, demonstrating to the taxpayer the government's commitment to achieving social and economic goals. The IT departments can help establish the necessary technology and infrastructure to collect and analyze data effectively while ensuring data security and privacy.

The value of data quality at the federal level cannot be overstated. History demonstrates that accurate and reliable data is crucial for making informed decisions, developing beneficial and sustainable policies, and achieving positive outcomes for society.

IT professionals must understand the importance of data quality and collaborate with other departments to establish and maintain the necessary policies, procedures, change controls, self-auditing techniques, and other key elements of a well-thought IT framework. Their successful implementation can lead to a more data-driven government that is better equipped to meet the needs of the public.

Paul Chernousov
Research Director, Industry
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Info-Tech Insight

Fix data quality issues as close as possible to the source of data, while understanding that business use cases will each have different requirements and expectations from data quality.

Data is the foundation of your agency's knowledge

Data enables your agency to make decisions.

Reliable data is needed to facilitate data consumers at all levels of the organization.

Insights, knowledge, and information are needed to inform operational, tactical, and strategic decision-making processes. Data and information are needed to manage the business and empower key business processes such as citizen touchpoints, cross agency interactions and strategic planning.

Data should be at the foundation of your agency’s evolution. The transformational insights that Ministers and Agency leaders are constantly seeking can be uncovered with a data quality practice that makes high-quality, trustworthy information readily available to the business users who need it.

98% of companies use data to improve customer experience.
— Source: Experian Data Quality, 2019

Efficiently manage data quality across the data landscape

Good data quality is achieved by working efficiently.

Where possible, fix your data issues at source;
it’s typically cheaper and is less disruptive.

Focus your efforts on your most critical data,
the data that supports your core functions and services.

Not every agency requires the same standard of data quality;
fix for need, not perfection.

Work collaboratively;
good data quality requires collective working across business, data, and IT teams.

Source: Build Your Data Quality Program