A few weeks ago, I met with the founder and CTO of a company over lunch to discuss their data strategy. They wanted to hear about the advanced analytics they could run to improve their business, given their large volume of customers and transactions.
During our conversation, I asked some simple questions: Did they know what the tables and columns in their database meant? If I asked three different people at their company to define an active customer, would they agree on the definition? Could they assign a data quality score to that information?
After considering these questions, they realized they needed to do some housekeeping before moving on to more advanced solutions.