Community-Driven Information Quality Standards: How IBM Developed and Implemented Standards for Information Quality

Purpose: Standards for information quality can help content developers within a company or enterprise create high-quality, high-value content, as well as an excellent user experience for its clients. This article explains how the content development community at IBM created meaningful standards, as well as the metrics to track their impact, as part of a closed-loop information quality process. Method: Instead of having one group dictate what the standards will be, the content developers at IBM worked together as a community to identify key requirements from internal and external sources, tested the standards with a set of key products, and then put the standards to use in increasingly larger numbers of products. Results: A community-driven approach to information quality standards allowed the IBM content developers to create standards that were meaningful to a variety of teams, ensuring that key aspects of information quality were addressed throughout the corporation. The use of metrics to track implementation and compliance allowed the IBM community to see when the standards were working, and when the standards needed to be updated to meet the changing needs of their clients. Conclusions: Implementing information quality standards is an admirable goal, but it should not be the end of a company's information quality journey. This should be considered a closed loop or wheel, with continual analysis of compliance data, client feedback, and other metrics driving continual improvements in information quality.