Process-Embedded Data Integrity

Despite the established theory and the history of the practical use of integrity rules, data quality problems, which should be solvable using data integrity rules, persist in organizations. One effective mechanism to solve this problem is to embed data integrity in a continuous data quality improvement process. The result is an iterative data quality improvement process as data integrity rules are defined, violations of these rules are measured and analyzed, and then the rules are redefined to reflect the dynamic and global context of business process changes. Using action research, we study a global manufacturing company that applied these ideas for improving data quality as it built a global data warehouse. This research merges data integrity theory with management theories about quality improvement using a data quality lens, and it demonstrates the usefulness of the combined theory for data quality improvement.