This paper reviews current industry problems concerning data quality, and takes a detailed look at how companies are addressing quality problems with customer, product, and other types of corporate data. It explains why data quality projects often evolve into master data management projects, and discusses how master data can be extracted from unstructured business content and integrated into traditional corporate data systems.

The paper looks at the role of data cleansing tools in helping improve data consistency and accuracy, and explains why companies need to take an enterprise-wide approach to data cleansing and data quality management. Products and use cases from Business Objects, an SAP company, are used in the paper to demonstrate how vendors are supporting data cleansing, and to illustrate how customers are using such capabilities.