Data Quality Certification using ISO/IEC 25012: Industrial Experiences

TL;DR

This paper reports on applying ISO/IEC 25012 data quality standards to certify data repositories in three European organizations, highlighting benefits and best practices for improving data trustworthiness.

Contribution

It presents an industrial application of data quality certification using ISO/IEC 25012, including practical insights, benefits, and best practices from real-world implementations.

Findings

Organizations gained better data understanding and management.

Certification improved long-term organizational sustainability.

Identified best practices for data quality evaluation.

Abstract

The most successful organizations in the world are data-driven businesses. Data is at the core of the business of many organizations as one of the most important assets, since the decisions they make cannot be better than the data on which they are based. Due to this reason, organizations need to be able to trust their data. One important activity that helps to achieve data reliability is the evaluation and certification of the quality level of organizational data repositories. This paper describes the results of the application of a data quality evaluation and certification process to the repositories of three European organizations belonging to different sectors. We present findings from the point of view of both the data quality evaluation team and the organizations that underwent the evaluation process. In this respect, several benefits have been explicitly recognised by the involved organizations after achieving the data quality certification for their repositories (e.g., long-term organizational sustainability, better internal knowledge of data, and a more efficient management of data quality). As a result of this experience, we have also identified a set of best practices aimed to enhance the data quality evaluation process.