Data Quality and Bandit Sheep?
Posted by Timo Elliott on Friday, February 29, 2008 · Leave a Comment
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It was widely reported this week that more than one out of every 100 Americans is a criminal.
That’s nothing… There’s a country that I can’t name (but they play rugby and have lots of sheep). The national police force wanted a “single view of the criminal”, and so created a central data warehouse from a variety of operational and legacy systems. The ended up with a database of 4.5 million names.
This was a problem, since the population of the country is only four million. So, either everybody in the country is a criminal AND they have half a million bandit sheep…
…or they have a data quality problem.
I was the eighth employee of 
