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BUSINESS PARTNERS SPEAK OUT
Data integrity: the most overlooked aspect of the Lotus Notes environment
By Ian Smith
The American Record Management Association (ARMA) reports that more than 90 percent of all business records today are electronic. How these records are managed, processed and stored has come under greater scrutiny with the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and other government regulations intended to protect individuals from the misuse of data.
Lack of data integrity can challenge your core business. Data integrity refers to the validity of data. You rely on valid data to make informed business decisions that affect the bottom line. Trend tracking becomes a wasted effort if the underlying data has been compromised. Your company's data, especially as it pertains to customers, is your most valuable asset. If your data is unreliable, your customers, vendors, management and anyone else who might have a vested interest in your enterprise will question your credibility.
In fact, poor data quality is a common problem for most organizations with 75 percent of respondents in some surveys admitting to data problems, according to John Radcliffe, vice president at Gartner. However, many of these companies don't realize the extent of the problem. "Significant initiatives, such as customer relationship management (CRM) and business intelligence (BI), are failing at high rates," he notes, adding that they often fail because the underlying data is of such poor quality.
Not only is data integrity under scrutiny, but the same is true for the software and systems that create, process and store this data. Was your data entered correctly? Was your data modified during electronic transmission by software bugs or viruses, a disk crash, or a disgruntled employee? Are your processes impacting the validity of your data?
In the IBM Lotus Notes and Domino environment, data integrity issues such as replication conflicts, disconnected links, or hidden or lost fields are common. In a Notes environment, unlike more "mainstream" database systems such as Oracle or DB2, it is rare to find a database administrator, someone who has the specific responsibility of managing the data within the system. As a result, the integrity (or lack thereof) of the Notes production environment can put your organization at risk. This lack of accountability can lead to material business risks, such as:
- Incorrect output data leading to inaccurate financial statements,
- Security vulnerabilities permitting the malicious access or destruction of critical corporate applications,
- Mission critical applications failing leading to loss of customer confidence
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