Not all data quality issues matter equally
Every operational system contains imperfect data. The relevant question is not whether errors exist, but whether they change a decision, a payment, a statutory return or a stated position.
Treating all data quality issues as equally urgent guarantees that the ones which genuinely matter are not prioritised.
Judging materiality
Changes a decision
High
Fix first
Changes a payment
High
Fix first
Affects a return
Medium
Correct and control
Cosmetic only
Low
Log and monitor
Where the risk usually sits
In our experience the most consequential issues are rarely the most visible:
- Records that are open in one system and closed in another
- Dates recorded when the entry was made rather than when the event occurred
- Free-text fields carrying information the reporting relies on
- Categories that changed meaning part-way through the year
- Manual overrides applied after extraction
- Duplicate records created by a process change
The governance point
A data quality issue becomes a management risk at the moment a figure derived from it is published, funded or defended. From that point it is no longer a systems problem — it belongs on a risk register with a named owner and a remediation date.
Fix the process, not just the record
Correcting individual records without addressing the point of capture produces the same errors next quarter.
Sustainable improvement usually comes from validation at the point of entry, clearer definitions for frontline staff and a small set of automated exception reports that surface problems while they can still be corrected.
Questions for a leadership team
- Which published figures would change if known data issues were corrected?
- Do you know the completeness rate of the fields your KPIs depend on?
- Who is accountable for data quality in each operational system?
- Are data issues visible to the board, or only to analysts?
- How long does a known error take to be corrected at source?
Any figures shown are illustrative and used to demonstrate an analytical approach. They do not describe a real Coreridge Solutions client.
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