What Is Information Integrity®

Industry analysts, software vendors, and many others use the term "data quality" to refer to the accuracy of business information. But, in today's competitive environment, you need more than data quality. You need Information Integrity – a comprehensive solution that assures the accuracy, consistency, and reliability of the financial, operational, and management information that you need to run your business.

Every organization in business, government, and society is concerned about – and affected by – Information Integrity. In fact, the Data Warehousing Institute™, estimates that poor quality customer data costs U.S. businesses a staggering $611 billion a year in postage, printing, and staff overhead.* The true cost of bad data is much higher. Although Information Integrity failures affect all organizations, until recently we have not recognized these failures as a pervasive issue, despite the fact that the lack of Information Integrity costs our economy billions of dollars.

Information Integrity Risks

Information must be accurate as it enters your organization, be processed in a consistent manner, and produce reliable outputs that both internal and external customers can have complete confidence in. Many software vendors and IT specialists claim that their products and systems are not susceptible to information errors. However, all organizations are increasingly vulnerable to errors caused by Information Integrity failures because these failures are primarily due to factors outside their systems – and beyond their control – including:

• Change: Organizational structure, legislation, personnel, hardware, and software.
• Complexity: The number and variety of components and interfaces, and the volume and speed of information processing.
• Communication: The risk of duplicate or missed information, or partial transmission or receipt of information.
• Conversion: Data consolidation, decomposition, or transformation.
• Corruption: Accidental failures and deliberate fraud.

Information Integrity Benefits

When Information Integrity failures occur, they can be enormously expensive. Implementing an enterprise-wide Information Integrity architecture that minimizes the exposure to external factors can effectively manage risk by:

• Preventing, monitoring, detecting, verifying, and correcting information errors.
• Enhancing security, audit, and control.
• Providing protection against information corruption caused by accidental failures – or deliberate fraud.
• Enabling data scrubbing and cleansing in the creation of data warehouses.
• Designing, developing, operating, using, and maintaining information systems.
• Converting existing systems following mergers, acquisitions, and consolidations.
• Modifying existing systems to accommodate changes such as new legislation or technology.
• Conforming to evolving industry-specific Information Integrity requirements.

Information Integrity Solutions

Infogix offers proven Information Integrity solutions that can make your vital business processes more efficient and effective than ever before. And best of all, we combine all of the benefits of Information Integrity – and the ease of automated enterprise-wide controls – into comprehensive solutions that can be customized to fit your needs. Learn about the history of Information Integrity and our solutions to see how Infogix is delivering on the promise of Information Integrity.

* "Data Quality and the Bottom Line," The Data Warehousing Institute, ©2002.