Avaya Group Safeguards Internal Information Quality

Avaya maintains more than 100 terabytes of customer, vendor, service, financial, and pricing data. To ensure that the stockpile complies with internal data standards, the company, which provides telecom equipment and services, last year established its Data Quality Center of Excellence.

The center's two dozen employees are responsible for implementing data quality management practices, such as avoiding the creation of duplicate records. Championed by Guy Lardieri, VP of strategic initiatives and business architecture, the center was created in April 2005 as a spin-off from a project to replace an aging system with enterprise applications from SAP and Siebel Systems.

The legacy system was hamstrung by defective data that drove up expenses and cut into revenue. In some cases, Avaya serviced customers' telecom equipment but didn't bill them for gear that was erroneously left out of service agreements. Other customers who paid only for standard service were getting premium service because of database errors, says Rich Trapp, Avaya's global data quality director.

Avaya's Data Quality Center of Excellence provides the tools for improving and maintaining data quality, including Business Objects' IQ Insight profiling tool for identifying bad data. The Data Quality Executive Council, made up of top company executives, "provides the teeth for the data quality efforts," Trapp says. But it's the business units that have ultimate responsibility for data quality.

Illustration by Jay Montgomery

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