Critical Cultural Success Factors for Achieving High Quality Information in an Organization

While information and data quality practitioners are in general agreement that social, cultural, and organizational factors are the most important in determining the success or failure of an organization’s data quality programs, there is little to no existing research quantifying these factors. In this research we build from both our previous research and others’ to distill and clarify those cultural factors which are the Critical Cultural Success Factors (CCSFs) for successful Information and Data Quality programs in an organization. Using the Delphi method for gaining consensus from a group of experts, we distilled fourteen factors down to six and clarified the definitions of those six factors. We begin explaining how these CCSFs fit into Organizational Learning Theory and plan to ultimately define a new system dynamics model incorporating them so that organizations and information quality practitioners can positively affect the success of information and data quality programs

Critical Success Factors for Data Quality Management

Data Quality is currently a relevant issue, considering that organizations sustain their operations and decision making in the data they have at their disposal. On the other hand, literature is unanimous in pointing out that poor data quality can result in large costs for organizations. The literature review identified twenty-four Critical Success Factors that were put to the consideration of a panel of experts, who ordered them according to their degree of importance, using the Delphi method with the Q-sort technique, based on an on-line questionnaire. The study showed that the five most important Critical Success Factors for Data Quality Management are: definition of appropriate policies and standards, control of inputs, definition of a strategic plan, organizational culture focused on quality of the data and obtaining commitment and support from the top management