Informatica Data Quality

Empowering Business Professionals to Manage Data Quality Across the Enterprise

Informatica Data Quality is specifically designed to put control of data quality processes in the hands of business professionals. With unparalleled ease-of-use, the software delivers powerful data quality profiling, cleansing, matching, and monitoring capabilities in a single solution. Data analysts and data stewards use the intuitive Informatica Data Quality interface to design, manage, deploy, and control individual and enterprise-wide data quality initiatives. By providing a complete platform for ongoing measurement, monitoring, tracking, and data quality improvement at multiple points across the organization, Informatica Data Quality empowers business information owners to implement and manage effective and lasting data quality processes.

Business Benefits

Increase revenue and improve customer service with high quality customer data

Increase confidence and reduce risks associated with compliance initiatives across e.g. Sarbanes Oxley, Know Your Customer, Basel II, HIPAA, etc.

Enable better decision making based on complete and accurate customer, product, inventory, sales, and financial data in the enterprise

Increase operational efficiencies by quickly identifying poor data quality and implementing ongoing data quality processes

Key Features

Data Quality Analysis. Data quality analysis enables data analysts and data stewards to identify, categorize, and quantify low quality data. By using business rules and reference data, low quality data can be categorized against a framework of data quality dimensions such as completeness, conformity, consistency, duplication, integrity, and accuracy. The results can be displayed graphically on the desktop with drilldown via the Data Quality workbench or can be written to a database. Desktop reports are used as a data quality scorecard and enable the user to demonstrate progress rapidly within a data quality project.

Data Cleansing and Standardization. Comprehensive data cleansing and parsing capabilities enable data analysts and data stewards to cleanse, standardize, validate, enhance, and enrich all types of enterprise data, including customer, product, financial, inventory, and asset data. The software addresses standardization and validation for a range of countries. It uses business rules and reference data dictionaries to parse and standardize free-form text data elements. Cleansing is an iterative process; data quality rules are validated using the Data Quality workbench reports to demonstrate improvement.

Data Matching. Robust and flexible data matching capabilities enable data analysts and data stewards to identify relationships between data records for de-duplication prior to a consolidation process. Matching capabilities cover a range of components which provide transparency and control to users and can be applied to any data field; matching can be applied to customer data or product data. The software processes multiple sets of business rules concurrently and uses "householding" techniques to identify members of common “households” or corporations.

Data Quality Reporting and Monitoring. Dynamic data quality reporting and monitoring enable data analysts and data stewards to support and drive a data quality culture and methodology based on measurements and supported by data quality reports. The software provides desktop and web based management-level data quality scorecards and reports that monitor key attributes of data quality (such as completeness, conformity, consistency, accuracy, de-duplication, and integrity) across all data types and sources. With Informatica Data Quality, users can access out-of-the-box data quality reports. Drill-down reports enable users to zoom in from high-level views to inspect low-quality data records individually. Users can create dashboards that can be exported to BI reporting tools or published to a company's Intranet to allow users to monitor data quality over time. With these data reporting and monitoring capabilities, organizations can improve overall data quality over the long term by being able to track improvements against realistic targets on an attribute-by-attribute basis. Companies can then establish a metric-driven process for managing data quality enterprise-wide that helps build the business case for executing data quality initiatives across the enterprise.

Open, Content-based Dictionaries. Open, content-based reference data dictionaries can be created, edited, and updated at any point in time. The flexibility of the product allows Informatica, third party, and customer-generated reference dictionaries to be used together to analyze and standardize content, and to implement data quality business rules. The dictionaries are a key strength for enabling data quality visibility within an organization and are critical for reporting and scorecarding processes. These dictionaries have full read/write capability and familiar Microsoft Excel-like functionality. They enable flexible, easy solution customization based on internal and external reference data.

Support for All Master Data Types. Informatica Data Quality was designed to provide a data quality framework to be used to analyze, parse, standardize, match, and monitor any type of data. Not limited to simply customer name and address cleansing, Informatica Data Quality is deployed by both industry and government agencies to manage the total quality of product, financial, inventory, pricing, asset, and other data. Informatica Data Quality can be used to cleanse, match, report, and monitor industry-specific data types (e.g., product data for the consumer packaged goods industry, asset data for utilities).

Global Language Support. Informatica Data Quality is Unicode-compliant, which enables the software to work with Latin and non-Latin character sets such as Russian, Polish, Chinese, and Japanese. This support allows organizations to expand easily their data quality programs globally across the enterprise, improving data quality over time to meet the demands of today's global economy.

Data Quality Workbench. The Data Quality Workbench features a graphical user interface, which business professionals use to design, build, and manage individual data quality projects or more complex, enterprise-wide data quality initiatives. The interface is familiar to anyone who accustomed to Windows-based applications. The Workbench provides access to a range of data quality components which enable access to data quality profiling, cleansing, standardization, matching, and reporting capabilities. The Data Quality Workbench increases IT's efficiency, effectiveness, and responsiveness to the business, by empowering information owners to resolve data quality problems themselves, rather than relying on overstretched IT departments who don't "own" the data.

Data Quality Assistant. This web based tool for Data Stewards provides a user interface to support an interactive data quality review and edit process which enables users to view, edit, and review low quality records before the records are written to the target. The process includes an interactive consolidation process where users review a match cluster and build a master record. An audit trail of all changes is included within this tool.

Data Quality for Enterprise Systems. This data quality solution supports SAP users entering Name and Address data according to SAP certification standards for postal validation (BC-BAS- PV) and Duplicate check & error tolerant search (BC-BAS-DES). Typically deployed in mature SAP environments where data quality is recognized as an inhibitor to customer related imperatives or operational efficiency drives. The capability is extensible to product and inventory master data.

Integration with Informatica PowerCenter. Informatica Data Quality is integrated with Informatica PowerCenter via PowerCenter Custom Transformations (CT). This integration enables collaboration between the business and IT; the business experts generate the data quality rules and IT deploys them as part of the data integration lifecycle.

High Scalability. Ready for enterprise-wide deployment, Informatica Data Quality can be deployed across a number of platforms, including Windows, Linux, and Unix. It can run interactively on a desktop, can be deployed as scheduled batch jobs, or run in real-time as part of an application environment. For scalable solutions and as part of a data integration lifecycle, Informatica Data Quality can be deployed with automated partitioning using Informatica PowerCenter to maximize the available hardware resources.

Web Services. The web services option enables organizations to deploy data quality functions as web services, providing all the benefits of web services. This option takes advantage of the integration with PowerCenter to exploit the scalability and management of web services for enterprise deployment.

Why Does Every Business Need Informatica Data Quality?

Empower Business Professionals to Take Control of Data Quality Initiatives
Informatica Data Quality puts data quality in the hands of those who understand it best , business data analysts and data stewards They are empowered to take control of enterprise-wide data quality initiatives and solve the pervasive problem of poor data quality. As the owners of the data define data quality standards and set data quality targets, Informatica Data Quality supports these early stages of a data quality project, enabling the business to identify, categorize, and quantify data quality issues. Taking ownership in this way is critical. The product supports a framework of data quality dimensions which can be the basis for collaboration between the business and IT. Once the business has built the data quality rules, IT can manage the deployment of the rules as part of a data management infrastructure solution.

Metrics and Reporting
Knowing where your organization stands in terms of key data quality is an important starting point for any data quality improvement initiative.

In the past, data quality audits were implemented to support a one-off business case and usually they relied on the results from a sample data survey. But data quality improvement is not simply a short-term undertaking. Properly addressing data quality requires more than merely fixing defective data; it also requires improving the processes that allow poor quality data to enter the system in the first place.

Establishing a baseline of the current state of data quality is the first step: this important starting point identifies the critical failure points and determines improvement targets. But, achieving the high levels of data quality needed to improve business efficiency and transparency is an iterative process that should to be tracked, managed, and monitored. Therefore, being able to measure and monitor data quality throughout the process lifecycle and compare the results over time is an essential ingredient in the proactive management of ongoing data quality improvement and data governance.

Manage Enterprise-wide Data Quality Initiatives
Achieving the high levels of data quality needed for a business to prosper is more than a one-off exercise. The only way to ensure the success of ongoing data quality initiatives is with an enterprise-class, highly scalable data quality solution. Informatica Data Quality provides a set of desktop and server based tools which enable both business users and IT to manage data quality within an enterprise. Informatica Data Quality integrates with PowerCenter for deployment of data quality functions within a data integration infrastructure. As a result, cleansing, matching, and data quality reporting can be managed by the same IT team that manages the movement of data. Automated partitioning is enabled for data quality within a PowerCenter environment enabling large volumes to be processed across all available hardware. Informatica Data Quality is Unicode compliant and therefore can handle global character sets. Informatica Data Quality works with all master data types, including customer, financial, inventory and materials data, thus laying the foundation for an enterprise data quality platform.

Product Literature