A Systematic Approach for Improving the Quality of IT Data

Overview

Efforts to reduce the cost of ownership for enterprise IT environments is spurring the development and deployment of data-driven management tools. Yet, IT data is imperfect and these imperfections can lead to inappropriate decisions that have significant technical and business consequences. Current responses to imperfections in IT data are ad-hoc and incremental owing to limited awareness of the problem and to data quality being an indirect business goal. In this paper, the authors begin by raising awareness of the imperfect IT data problem through examples of the imperfections that occur, and a discussion of their causes and implications on IT management tasks. The paper then introduces a systematic approach for addressing such imperfections.