Data quality is a serious issue. How serious? Check out Dan Tynan's riveting article on the big effects of small mistakes Everyone has their own story about a data error with unforeseen consequences. My personal favorite is about a guy... Data quality is a serious issue. How serious? Check out Dan Tynan’s riveting article on the big effects of small mistakes Everyone has their own story about a data error with unforeseen consequences. My personal favorite is about a guy who, in the mid-1970s, put in an order for Kruegerrands — and somehow accidentally added a zero to the order. He had no choice but to scrounge up the money, but it turned out to be the investment of his life: Gold shot up like a hockey stick and he suddenly had the down payment for a house. Few tales of data error have such happy endings. This week’s big feature article, “The perils of dirty data,” offers a Halloween bestiary of data horror stories, from direct mail with insulting salutations to attempted interaction with (literally) dead customers. Author Dan Tynan did a great job getting IT pros to cough up potentially incriminating anecdotes, although, as you might expect, names have been concealed in somecases to protect the innocent. Dan’s tales of woe highlight a serious issue that’s reaching critical mass, particularly in large organizations engaging in serious data integration efforts. Last March we published a special report on securing and cleansing enterprise data that covered some of the latest solutions, including automated data matching to reconcile records entered through different systems. On the data integration front, every business intelligence player talks about master data management, while every major enterprise software company now touts some sort of data integration solution; IBM, for example, can’t stop talking about its Information Server platform. In a conversation a couple of weeks ago, Burton Group analyst Anne Thomas Manes even suggested to me that one important reason Oracle wanted to acquire BEA was for its “really nice” data services suite. All this goes to show that data quality and integration are still among the toughest problems in IT. A fond farewell As you may know, Steve Fox signed off as editor in chief of InfoWorld last week. I worked with Steve for nearly all of the four-and-a-half years he spent here at InfoWorld, and I’m honored to be able to take his place. We at InfoWorld wish Steve the best in his new venture. Technology Industry