Data Scrubbing
Many companies hold lists of data for a variety of reasons. For example, if you have a list of your regular customers, that’s essentially a list of data. If you have a more specific list, like a list of people who currently hold a specific type of license, that’s also a list of data, and it’s more likely to change even more frequently because it’s not connected to your company directly.
When you have lists of data, it only makes sense that data would end up being out of date eventually. This is far more common when you’re managing an extremely dynamic list of data, such as a list of people who have a certain type of license, but it’s possible to have your data end up becoming out of date for many reasons.
What Is Data Scrubbing?
When your data is out of date, you need a way to fix that, and data scrubbing is the best way. With data scrubbing, you can go through all your data and see what’s currently out of date, then fix it. Data scrubbing isn’t just for out-of-date data, however. It can also help with incorrect, missing, and redundant data, as well as errors in your database as a whole. When you improve the quality of your data, you make it less likely you’ll make errors in the future.
How Do Errors in Databases Form?
There are many ways an error in your database may form. These errors depend on how you created the database and how long it’s been since you added the data. Here are just a few of the ways data errors may form:
- Human error formed when a person inputs information into the database.
- Machine error formed when your business took incorrect information from another database.
- Out-of-date error formed because data is no longer up to date.
- User error formed when an individual gives you incorrect information either accidentally or on purpose.
These are all ways errors can form in your database, but they’re by no means the only ways errors can form. Data scrubbing is crucial if you want to make sure that you’re keeping a great database at all times.
What Are Some Uses for Data Scrubbing?
Data scrubbing can be extremely helpful for just about any organization that maintains a database full of people. No matter what type of database you have, you need to use data scrubbing methods to make sure that your data is as clean and up to date as possible. These are some of the benefits of data scrubbing:
- Be more certain your information is up to date.
- Remove incorrect information that could harm your database.
- Learn more about the data you currently have.
- Add correct data to your database.
- Remove redundant information that’s taking up extra space.
- Contact people more easily and more effectively.
Of course, just having a clean database can almost be its own benefit. You need to make sure you’re thinking about data scrubbing as a regular event, not as something you do only when there’s a problem.
How Can Enformion Help My Company With Data Scrubbing?
Data scrubbing is a great way to make sure your database is effective in whatever way you need it to be. However, to do data scrubbing, you need another source that you’re confident is factual. Enformion is that source. Check your database against Enformion when you need to do data scrubbing for the best results.