Data Quality

CIMP · 50 questions

• A county assessor finds parcel records with blank owner names in a required field used for tax notices. A clerk calls it 'incomplete paperwork' and wants to ignore it. How should the information manager treat the blanks?
• A city utility customer information system shows two different account balances for the same customer depending on which screen staff open. What data quality concern does this primarily illustrate?
• A public-health registry contains rows where the recorded birth date falls after the recorded death date. Which data quality issue do these rows primarily demonstrate?
• A municipal permitting office needs yesterday's permit volume for a 9 a.m. council briefing, but the warehouse batch that normally loads overnight finished six hours late. How should timeliness be judged in this situation?
• A transit authority CRM lists the same rider under three slightly different names and phone formats. What data quality problem does this primarily represent?
• A library consortium asks why 'data quality' means more than running a spell-check on free-text notes. Which statement best captures the practitioner definition?
• A township finance lead assumes poor data quality is always caused by careless clerks. What should an information manager emphasize instead?
• A city launches a new online form that silently truncates long street names to fit a short database field. What does this scenario primarily illustrate?
• A county merges two departments' spreadsheets without a shared definition of 'active client.' What is the most likely data quality cause of the resulting inconsistencies?
• A parks department dashboard looks correct until staff learn that 'open work orders' intentionally excludes closed-but-unverified jobs by documented business rule. How should an information manager classify this situation?
• A municipal GIS team runs frequency counts and null rates on a new parcel extract before trusting it for mapping. What is the primary purpose of this statistical profiling?
• A clerk charts value distributions for a sample of addresses and immediately spots impossible ZIP codes. Which technique is the clerk primarily using?
• Before writing automated rules, a DQ analyst samples free-text 'issue type' fields and finds twenty synonyms for the same complaint. What practice does this illustrate?
• A county wants every parcel ID to match an established cadastral pattern. Which family of data quality rules does this requirement represent?
• A utility requires that every meter reading reference an existing meter ID in the asset register. Which type of data quality rule is this?
• Analysts cannot use a 'priority' field because half the values are blank and the other half are inconsistent free text. Which quality criterion family is most directly at stake for consumers?
• A municipal risk score systematically under-represents rural ZIP codes because source coverage is uneven across the county. At information-management practitioner depth, what quality concern does this raise?
• A DQ lead publishes a monthly red/yellow/green scorecard by domain for the CIO. What is the primary role of such a scorecard?
• An issue queue shows the same address defect opened twelve times by different teams. What should structured DQ issue management emphasize?
• Nightly jobs keep cleansing bad ZIP codes, yet the source CRM continues generating the same errors. What should the DQ approach prioritize?
• A city wants 'quality by design' in a new permitting workflow. Which approach best matches that goal?
• After a data integration job, orphan foreign keys spike in a municipal case-management warehouse. What does this primarily indicate?
• A DQ specialist proposes thresholds and named owners for each critical data element. What program practice does this exemplify?
• SPC-style control charts on daily null rates show a sudden shift immediately after a public form change. How should the team interpret this monitoring signal?
• A city council asks whether making data more 'accurate' always makes it more 'complete.' What is the sound information-management answer?
• Permit clerks export license rows to a spreadsheet, fix misspelled business names locally, and never write the corrections back to the licensing system. What data-quality anti-pattern is this?
• A vendor inventory feed passes every format check, yet every unit code is systematically the wrong UOM for the city's warehouse system. What quality distinction should the analyst make?
• A county clinic must submit immunization records to the state and needs data-quality rules for required shot fields. How should those rules be chosen?
• A DQ dashboard shows 99% complete phone fields for utility customers, but half the values are placeholders like 000-0000. What measurement pitfall does this illustrate?
• A remediation sprint cleans years of bad address rows in the property system but leaves the capture form free-text and unconstrained. What outcome should the program expect?
• After a case-management upgrade, old-to-new status crosswalk tables were never maintained, so reports mix retired and current codes. What integrity failure is this?
• A city's DQ charter lists critical data elements for billing, safety alerts, and regulatory reports—not every column in every system. What prioritization principle is being applied?
• Profiling of 'household size' on housing applications shows multimodal spikes at 0 and 99. How should the DQ analyst interpret that signal?
• Executives ask for one enterprise 'data quality score' that rolls every domain into a single number. What caveat should the DQ lead raise?
• A nightly job 'fixes' organization names by Title-Casing every token, which breaks legitimate acronyms such as HUD and FEMA. What DQ lesson applies?
• HR insists a null middle name is a defect; permitting staff say it is fine. How should the DQ team settle whether the null is defective?
• A parks department is onboarding a new SaaS reservation tool, and the contract has no data-quality acceptance criteria for inbound feeds. What quality-by-design gap exists?
• Root-cause analysis on wrong fee codes finds training gaps and ambiguous UI labels—not a database constraint bug. What should the team conclude?
• Daily DQ dashboards turn red when thresholds fire, but nobody is on-call and no playbook assigns owners. What management failure is this?
• Before a tax-system go-live, the migration team wants to 'clean everything' with no prioritization under a hard cutover date. What approach should the DQ lead urge?
• IT proposes a reusable address standardization service that many civic apps will call at capture time. How should this be framed in a quality-by-design program?
• An analyst claims that running profiling tools equals having a data-quality program. What distinction should leadership make?
• Seasonal building-permit spikes create temporary completeness dips that trip a static DQ threshold every spring. What measurement design change is needed?
• Clerks type fee amounts into a free-text 'notes' field because the fee field is locked, then finance scrapes those notes for billing. What anti-pattern is this?
• After a GDPR-style minimization project, several analytics fields were dropped—improving privacy but breaking completeness for a legacy grant report. What should the program do?
• A DQ assessment lists defects by system, owner, and recommended control. How should leadership treat that report?
• A deduplication tool's match confidence scores are used to auto-merge citizen records with no business review, including near-threshold matches. What practice should DQ insist on?
• The CIO wants 'one number' proving data-quality ROI for the next budget cycle. How should the DQ lead communicate value?
• A team debates whether machine learning can replace data-quality rules entirely for permit and billing constraints. What balanced stance fits modern DQ practice?
• When a verified fix lands, what closed-loop remediation practice should the issue workflow enforce?