AM4: Data Acquisition to Information Delivery: Ensuring Quality Along the Whole Data Lifecycle

This introductory workshop discusses the often lengthy path from raw data and its collection to meaningful (and “decision-able”) information for managers and executives. All along the way are issues of data quality, meaning, integration, and proper management. Some valuable data is acquired from external sources with many potential points of failure. Internally-generated data must also be fully understood before passed along the “data supply chain” through data warehouses, marts, visualization, and reporting techniques.

We will review a broad taxonomy of data behavior and errors to test for at all levels of the architecture. These quality tests can be performed with the simplest reporting tools you probably already have.

Attendees will learn:

The many potential pitfalls of importing data from external sources
Basic techniques for evaluating the quality of acquired data
The fundamentals of semantic data integration at the entity, field, and row level

Michael Scofield has been an Assistant Professor in Health Information Management at Loma Linda University in the Department of Health Information Management. He is a frequent speaker to a variety of professional and general audiences on topics of data management, data quality, data warehouse design, and data visualization.

His career has included education and private industries in the areas of data quality, decision-support systems, data warehousing, and data management. His articles appear in DM Review, the B-Eye Newsletter, InformationWeek magazine, the IBI Systems Journal, and other professional journals. He also has humor published in the L.A. Times and other journals.