Phase one: Understand goals and requirements

Phase one of the data cleansing workflow is to understand your organizational goals and requirements.

Not every organization has the same needs and objectives for data quality. Before you start designing your data cleansing project, you should understand the organizational goals that are driving the data-cleansing need and how they define your data cleansing assignment (the effective goal). This insight helps you gain a sense of the complexity of the intended cleansed data and provides a context in which you can make decisions throughout the workflow.

The success of a data cleansing project benefits from well-defined requirements for the output data results. As a best practice, provide opportunities throughout the every phase for domain experts and knowledge holders, who understand the organizational requirements of the data, to review the output results, to help iteratively refine requirements, and ultimately to approve the results. This collaborative process helps you meet the organizational requirements, increasing your chances for successful quality results.