Profile, Measure, and Assess Risks

A thorough look at data generated at the point of origin

Baseline’s Source Data Analysis provides you with a comprehensive assessment, profile, and comparison of data on one or more key source systems.

Baseline uses profiling tools and statistical measurement to give you a structured way to understand what data exists, how proprietary it is, its accuracy, its relevance, and whether it should be included in your company’s systems of record catalog.

The service can be delivered in combination with other Baseline offerings, such as the Data Quality Audit, to give you a sustained approach to data acquisition, definition, standardization, and reconciliation. Or it can be delivered separately as a litmus test for evaluating data on a source system prior to the often costly activity of acquiring it.

» Your Challenges
» The Problem
» The Baseline Approach
» Your Value
» Why Baseline

Your Challenges

• Data quality issues
• Multiple sources generating same data
• Non-existent documentation of source systems
• Data models and file structures not understood
• Lack of knowledge about core data elements
• Mismatch between source system data and developers’ definition
• Analyzing multiple data sources for a high profile IT project

» Back to top of page

The Problem

Inability to understand source data imperils many an IT project

There have been so many IT projects brought to their knees due to the inability of developers to understand source data. The causes range from inadequate source system documentation to the lack of resources available to support operational systems to source system owners refusing to share information from proprietary or homegrown systems.

Few companies have source system owners who are specifically responsible for deploying quality data to systems and users across the organization. Moreover, the acknowledged owners of these systems aren’t necessarily intimate with the data. Therefore, source systems often remain a “no man’s land” when it comes to understanding and using key business data.

The ripple effects can be significant, often imperiling project timeframes and objectives.
Before you begin your next IT project – whether business intelligence, data warehousing, application development, or data integration – understanding source data issues could be critical to your success.

» Back to top of page

The Baseline Approach

Combining data profiling with business program risk assessment

It all begins with the “systems of origin” that generate data in the first place. These systems, while essential to business operations, are often the culprits when it comes to lack of standardized, reconciled, or clean data, and the downstream effects on the business.

Delivering data-enabled solutions to business means understanding your company’s data quality, data integration, and data management challenges. And this means getting to the “root cause” of the issue—going straight to the source, the operational systems that originate data.

Baseline’s Source Data Analysis service completes a comprehensive analysis of your data using a profiling tool compatible with your current operational and technical environment. The profiling tool does the “heavy lifting”—sifting through the data and doing the statistical comparisons.

Then Baseline generates a source system profile that includes measurements of important qualifiers such as the percentage of null values in key fields, the degree of data replication, the percentage of formatting discrepancies, and the distribution of values.

We conclude the Source Data Analysis with a risk assessment at both a micro- and macro-level—how data and metadata within the source system may be compromised and how this places business programs at risk. The Source Data Analysis alerts your IT project sponsors to the potential impact of poorly understood, missing, inaccurate, or proprietary source data.

» Back to top of page

Your Value

Data assessment as an early warning system can streamline IT projects and avoid wasted work effort

Source Data Analysis helps you avoid wasted work effort caused by incorrect assumptions about the source system and its data. IT projects benefit from streamlining data acquisition, simplification of ETL and data cleanup, and rerouting applications to other systems that may generate more relevant, accurate, or timely information.

Upon completion of the Source Data Analysis, you are fully ready to decide if:

• The operational system(s) in questions are candidates to serve as data sources for a data warehouse, business intelligence, customer data integration (CDI), or master data management program.
• Source system data should be replicated across more than one source.
• Source systems are outdated and need to be replaced.
• ETL jobs accessing the source systems should be modified, replaced, or targeted to alternative systems.
• Data generated by the source system is relevant to the target system or application.

» Back to top of page

Why Baseline

Helping you make data assessment a permanent part of your IT infrastructure

Baseline advocates understanding the root causes of data issues before turning to automation. Source Data Analysis offers your company a thorough look at the data generated at the point of origin, often the most difficult type of data assessment a company can undertake.

Moreover, Baseline can help you leverage Source Data Analysis to address organizational challenges that historically plague many companies.
A common recommendation from the Source Data Analysis is the creation of a new role, Source Data Steward, for systems that are either highly complex or in demand by other business applications.

Another typical outgrowth is that companies incorporate data assessment—a data profiling tool and analysis process—as a permanent part of their source system infrastructures.

Baseline Consulting excels at helping companies deploy integrated and meaningful business information to departments, individuals, and subsidiaries. We not only understand the applications that use data, but we also specialize in the methods to acquire and integrate data.

» Back to top of page