CEO Monthly Reflection | August 2024 | When Is the Quality Fight Won?
Blog | August 29, 2024
By Terence McCarron
I often get asked some variation of this question when it comes to Data Quality:
“What can I do to fix the data quality problem for good?” Ever wonder that?
Do any of these other thoughts resonate?
- Everyone is talking about the problems, but there don’t seem to be any solutions.
- Why are my clients suddenly fixated on quality when I’ve been trying to explain this to them for years?
- If we have technology to prevent fraud and promote QUALITY, shouldn’t fraud disappear?
- Why aren’t the sample vendors doing anything about this?
These are all fair and reasonable thoughts/questions. Here’s a construct I tend to use to put all of this in a broader context.
Fraud is a ubiquitous digital problem that goes way behind our industry. Here is a sampling of a few headlines all occurring within 72 hours of my typing these words:
If that’s not convincing, think about the security hoops you jump through with your bank. Passwords, pins, biometrics, 2FA, etc. One of our OpinionRoute banks has security so locked down, I rarely can log in without reconfirming something.
In that context, my perspective shifts away from “checking the box” or to counting fraud as “solved” and toward a mindset of “always-on” security system around all of our projects.
Whether we like it or not, we’ll never permanently eliminate attempts by bad actors to profit from fraud in our ecosystem. It’s a sign of digital research’s scale and prominence.
In the OpinionRoute world of data quality, we don’t work with too many “shoulds”. We just start with where things are and make them better.
Here’s how we go about that:
The OpinionRoute quality approach focuses on a few core principles:
- Place a security bubble wrap around every client survey.
- Study & learn from a network effect on a respondent level.
- Build in a way that anchors on Researchers’ expertise forever playing a key role.
- Build quality benchmarking data in every unique client instance.
- Leverage AI where appropriate to save researchers’ time.
So, yes it may sometimes feel scary right now. But, we’ve never been better equipped to handle the fraud challenges. Think of our first consumer experiences with viruses in the early 2000s. Now we worry less about those things because, while never 100%, the protection systems in places do an overall wonderful job protecting our technology.
Want some help with your Quality fight? Let’s chat!