How to Ensure Data Consistency and Quality by Sally El Hadidi via @Datafloq

Poor data quality negatively impacts your company on many levels. Not only does it lead to bad decision-making, but it can be costly as well.

Some great suggestions. My own suggestions are:
Make sure that data definitions are consistent - e.g. is a customer number the same format in all sources?

• Do accurate and detailed documentation to map the data in each system and how to join it together - you might be surprised just how difficult that is.
• Use validation everywhere to make sure that the quality of the data is good everywhere.  e.g. use drop down boxes or master tables to make sure that all fields that could be used to group or classify are a set of standard values.