Maintaining Quality in Information Systems

Abstract

Many companies continually strive toward creating and maintaining quality products and processes. What is vitally important, but is often overlooked in the literature, is that to achieve a quality organization, you must begin by emphasizing the importance of creating and maintaining quality data and information systems. Information pervades all activities of an organization, and without efforts to collect, store, and process data in a manner that ensures quality information the organization's ability to promote total quality will be severely lessened. This paper presents a discussion of issues related to data quality, problems achieving data quality, and methods to address these problems. A discussion of quality software is also presented, as is a focus on the total quality management effort as it applies to information systems.