Getting Value from Data – Getting Results
 All of the water companies in England and Wales are required by the regulator to collect and maintain data at an acceptable level of quality so that investment decisions can be justified. The WRc Portfolio Project “Getting Value from Data” is developing approaches that will assist companies in better targeting and realising benefit from data improvement programmes.
The Getting Value form Data project began in April 2009 and is already achieving results for its participants.
A methodology has been developed that enables companies to identify and quantify their data quality issues. The methodology is business-process-based and considers the end-to-end information requirements by addressing the different stages of the Capital Maintenance Planning Common Framework (CMPCF). A number of data improvement workshops based on the methodology have been held with the project participants and beneficial outcomes have already been established.
A particular finding of these workshops has been that, in many cases, data quality issues are associated with the information flows. These problems can be addressed by either correcting or streamlining the business processes that collect and exchange information. In such instances the workshops have identified simple-to-fix issues as well as generating the buy-in to affect the required change in the business processes. Such issues have the benefit that they are relatively easily addressed, provide tangible benefits and are accordingly more readily justified.
The project is also conducting a number of data quality improvement trials to prove the effectiveness of IT-based techniques for addressing inherent data quality issues such as missing data, inconsistent naming conventions, etc. Suitable software tools have been identified and a series of trials have been conducted using large scale water company data sets.
Finally an approach is being developed that will identify the cost to the business of not addressing data quality issues. For each data quality issue the cost of not improving the data is quantified against auditable indicators. In this way the financial benefits of large scale data improvement initiatives can be assessed against the investment required to carry out the initiative.
For more information about this project please contact john.cima@wrcplc.co.uk 01793 865201.
|