Validating Data Quality Actions in Scoring Processes

Data quality has gained momentum among organizations upon the realization that poor data quality might cause failures and/or inefficiencies, thus compromising business processes and application results. However, enterprises often adopt data quality assessment and improvement methods based on practical and empirical approaches without conducting a rigorous analysis of the data quality issues and outcome of the enacted data quality improvement practices. In particular, data quality management, especially the identification of the data quality dimensions to be monitored and improved, is performed by knowledge workers on the basis of their skills and experience. Control methods are therefore designed on the basis of expected and evident quality problems; thus, these methods may not be effective in dealing with unknown and/or unexpected problems. This article aims to provide a methodology, based on fault injection, for validating the data quality actions used by organizations. We show how it is possible to check whether the adopted techniques properly monitor the real issues that may damage business processes. At this stage, we focus on scoring processes, i.e., those in which the output represents the evaluation or ranking of a specific object. We show the effectiveness of our proposal by means of a case study in the financial risk management area.