I recently met a UK organisation struggling to launch their first major DQ initiative. The usual causes were present such as ownership and available skills etc.

So I decided to pose the question to a wider audience under the banner of “What are the 3 main reasons your organisation has failed to launch a DQ initiative?”

This survey presents the findings, using an interactive display tool that also provides the underlying responses, it makes for interesting reading.

Data Quality Survey - The 3 Most Common Causes of Implementation Failure

I used LinkedIn answers for this, great tool as you get some really descriptive responses which help you get a much clearer view of where people are struggling in their DQ journeys.

(If you want to learn how to create your own DQ survey using LinkedIn, click on this link).

I collated the results into broad categories and the final outcome is displayed in the graphing tool below

Okay, the first caveat is that this was really a sample survey, we had about 30 responses and these were from a variety of different organisational roles.

The second caveat is that the categorisation was largely subjective and some of the responses could conceivably fall into two different categories but on the whole I think it is fairly reflective.

Some of the take-home messages would appear to be:

• Nearly 80% of issues were caused by a failure to understand the DQ process, create a valid business case or assign ownership
• Technology would not appear to be the primary issue for concern in most organisations
• The majority of the DQ process issues could be resolved with fairly standard DQ techniques, specialist DQ skills training is obviously paramount
• Organisations need to become a lot more skilled in preparing the business case, this is an area we will focus on within Data Quality Pro in the coming weeks and months

To drill into the results just click on the various bars and the responses will be shown. We can provide the raw data if you will find it useful.

What reasons are behind your organisation failing to implement a data quality strategy?

Want to find other data quality surveys to use in your presentations, marketing or business case collateral? Why not check out our DQ QuickLink feature and just add "survey" into the search box (click here).