Comments on: Beauracracy http://www.bowlingpages.net/shayna/?p=55 Tidbits from a Frazzled Mamma Fri, 08 Jan 2010 04:03:05 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.4 By: Toby http://www.bowlingpages.net/shayna/?p=55&cpage=1#comment-92 Toby Fri, 16 Feb 2007 16:01:00 +0000 http://www.bowlingpages.net/shayna/?p=55#comment-92 You'd be surprised (or maybe not) at how common this is. One of the big struggles we have as a company is data quality issues - in many cases the people who do the data entry don't really know or care how what they put in impacts the rest of the system. Unfortunately, often this causes much larger problems for the whole system. When I was at Pittsburgh Public Schools, we spent days each year matching up the public assistance files to our records. We wanted to make sure all the students who were eligible for free/reduced lunch status received it. But on both sets of data (ours AND the public assistance rolls), there were huge discrepancies - wrong birthdates, grossly misspelled names, nicknames, etc. Even now with my company, we have a guy who spends a great deal of time telling districts about data quality issues. It is a huge headache. You’d be surprised (or maybe not) at how common this is. One of the big struggles we have as a company is data quality issues – in many cases the people who do the data entry don’t really know or care how what they put in impacts the rest of the system. Unfortunately, often this causes much larger problems for the whole system.

When I was at Pittsburgh Public Schools, we spent days each year matching up the public assistance files to our records. We wanted to make sure all the students who were eligible for free/reduced lunch status received it. But on both sets of data (ours AND the public assistance rolls), there were huge discrepancies – wrong birthdates, grossly misspelled names, nicknames, etc.

Even now with my company, we have a guy who spends a great deal of time telling districts about data quality issues. It is a huge headache.

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