Data Cleaning Tools

Buyers guide

Cleanliness is next to godliness, as the old saying goes, and this holds true for data and information as much as it does for human beings. As a business, you rely on your data to be correct, complete and up-to-date, so you can make the right decisions. Thus, it can be disastrous for you if that data is inaccurate.

However, given the vast quantities of data that flow in and out of the modern business, it's impossible to ask a human being, or even an entire team, to monitor your data and check for problems, gaps and inconsistencies. Only data cleaning tools can scour your database for these sorts of issues and automatically replace, modify or delete the flawed data.

This buyer's guide will explain what data cleaning tools are, explore their common features and point to some of the bigger issues your business should be concerned about when selecting the right data cleaning software for you.

Here's what we'll cover:

What Are Data Cleaning Tools?
Data Cleaning vs. Data Validating
Common Features of Data Cleaning Tools
What Type of Buyer Are You?
Key Considerations

What Are Data Cleaning Tools?

Success in business, and in business intelligence, relies on information—who has it, what they do with it and how good it is. Your business is only as strong as the quality of its data, so you should analyze your past and present successes in order to replicate them in the future, while simultaneously exploring what went wrong with your failures in order to avoid recreating them.

However, not all data is created equal. Generally, your data comes in the form of a record set, table or database, and each of those is equally likely to have a variety of incorrect, inconsistent or duplicate data points. This can be caused by a multitude of issues, including user entry and corruption of the file while in transmission or in storage. Whatever the reason it exists, though, that bad data needs to go.

That's where data cleaning tools come in. These software systems will scan through your information and find the data which stands out as being problematic. Depending on the system and your preferences, you can either have that data automatically scrubbed or replaced, or you can just have it flagged for manual review and updating.

Data cleaning can take a variety of forms:

• Finding and removing typographical errors
• Checking and validating entries against a list of known entities
• Enhancing the data with extra, related information
• Standardization and harmonization of data, so that all data uses the same standards of codes, measurements, and words
• Cross-checking with a validated data set

Data Cleaning vs. Data Validation

Though they can sometimes be mistakenly used interchangeably, there's an important distinction between data cleaning and data validation:

• Data cleaning. As discussed above, data cleaning takes an existing set of data (a table, record set, database etc.) and scans through it to search for certain specified errors, inconsistencies and blank spots.
  
• Data validation. Data validation is performed at the time of data entry. It is not something that is performed on data that is already at hand, but rather ensures that the data will not need to be cleaned at a later date by validating it as it is originally entered.

Common Features of Data Cleaning Tools

What Type of Buyer Are You?

No matter the size or scale of your business, you're likely relying on some kind of database to keep track of your contacts, customers, inventory or other important pieces of information. In order to ensure that the database you're using is correct and up-to-date, you will find data cleaning tools useful.

However, not all businesses are alike, and neither are the data cleaning tools for those businesses. Appropriate tools will be based on the size and scale of the business. Your own business will fall into one of the following categories, based on its size:

• Small business (Under 10 employees). Though your small business may not be able to afford all the features of some data cleaning tools, the good news is that you may not have to. At a smaller size, businesses have less data to worry about, and can get by with some of the more basic data cleaning systems with fewer features.
  
• Midsize business (10-100 employees). At the midsize business level, you are in some ways faced with the worst of both worlds—you have enough data that you need to ensure it is clean and up-to-date, but you probably can't afford to hire a specific team or individual to maintain it. Robust data cleaning tools with a wide array of features will thus be important to your business, so you can maintain high-quality data at a reasonable cost.
  
• Large business (100-500 employees). Larger businesses will definitely need a robust data cleaning tool that can go through the large amount of data that flows in and out of your records and databases. Though you may be able to afford to hire a dedicated team to maintain data cleaning, they will still ultimately rely on high-quality software to enable them to do their jobs more efficiently.

Key Considerations

Other factors to take into consideration when choosing the right data cleaning tools for your business include:

Access to other systems. In order for data cleaning tools to work, they need access to your data. This may be housed in a variety of places within your computer systems—in your business intelligence software, your customer relationship management software, your project management software or anywhere else that you house large amounts of important information—and thus requires the data cleaning tools to be compatible with the interface and formatting of those databases. Be sure to check with the vendor that the data cleaning tools you are purchasing will be able to access and clean all of your information across these various databases.

Cloud-based software vs. on-premise software. Only a few years ago, software was mostly housed on-premise, meaning that companies had to maintain the physical hardware for the products they purchased, necessitating both storage space and IT knowledge/resources. This made that software more difficult to use for smaller businesses. Today, however, most data cleaning tools can be purchased and employed using a cloud-based model, where the hardware is housed by the vendor and the software is simply deployed by accessing it over the internet. This makes those tools more readily available to small-to-midsize businesses without high-level IT resources, especially since cloud-based software is often quicker and easier to use than on-premise solutions, with fewer up-front costs.