Businesses rely heavily on data and information in making important business decisions but pay little attention to the health of their data quality and the risks, issues and costs associated therewith. InfoBlueprint, specialists in data management and information quality, will be co-hosting a breakfast briefing in mid-April, in conjunction with Informatica and Knowledge Integration Dynamics to address these issues towards better Business Intelligence (BI).

Bryn Davies, managing director of InfoBlueprint, speaker at the forthcoming breakfast briefing, says: "One of the major stumbling blocks to delivering ROI (return on investment) on BI initiatives has proven to be poor data and information quality. Frequently, the quality of the data to be analysed or reported on is overlooked, or assumed to be adequate. These 'data surprises' are often discovered too late, leading to delays in the implementation of BI initiatives and budget over spend."

"Data is typically 'scrubbed' before it is loaded into a data warehouse environment, but as the drive toward real-time BI continues in the face of ever increasing data volumes, it will become increasingly costly and difficult to address data quality problems simply via repetitive data cleansing," says Bryn.

"What is needed is a strategic data quality programme where businesses formally and objectively assess and then address their organisational data and information management processes, leading to trustworthy data at source, and the elimination of ongoing institutionalised cleansing."

The event takes place over two days - on 16 April in Cape Town at The Radisson Hotel, Beach Road, Granger Bay and on 17 April in Johannesburg at The Saxon, 36 Saxon Road, Sandhurst. For more information on these and other forthcoming data management and information quality events, contact InfoBlueprint on +27 (0) 21 551 2410.

Venues

Date: 16 April 2008
Location: The Radisson Hotel, Beach Road, Granger Bay, Cape Town

Date: 17 April 2008
Location: The Saxon, 36 Saxon Road, Sandhurst, Johannesburg

Company name: InfoBlueprint
Telephone number: +27 (0) 21 551 2410