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Data Audits & Automated Quality Governance

What This Document Covers

Knowing that data quality matters is not the same as knowing how to measure it, enforce it, and sustain it. This is a practitioner guide covering:

  1. How to actually conduct a data audit across all six quality dimensions, and score each one
  2. How to translate audit findings into measurable, enforced quality rules
  3. How to automate those rules so governance runs continuously
  4. How to connect automation to remediation so issues get fixed, not just flagged

The goal: data quality that is not a project that runs once and decays, but an operational property of the infrastructure enforced automatically, visible continuously, and owned by named people.

Data Quality defines the six dimensions this guide measures, and explains what each one means for AI specifically. Read it first if the dimensions are unfamiliar.


Part 1: How to Conduct a Data Audit

What a Data Quality Audit Actually Is

A data quality audit reviews data assets against defined standards for accuracy, completeness, consistency, timeliness, validity, and uniqueness. It runs in two modes:

  • Internal continuous auditing — automated checks running on a schedule or triggered by pipeline events
  • External periodic auditing — independent review of quality practices and compliance posture, typically annually or before a major AI initiative

For AI readiness specifically, audits serve a third purpose: fitness-for-purpose validation — not just "is this data correct" but "is this data trustworthy enough to train a model or feed an agent that will act on it autonomously."


Step 1: Define Scope and Objectives

Before touching any data, define exactly what you are auditing and why.

  • Which systems, tables, and fields are in scope?
  • What use case does this data support? Reporting? ML training? Agent decision-making?
  • Which quality dimensions matter most for this use case?
  • What is the acceptable quality threshold — and what happens when it is not met?
  • Who is the data owner who will receive and act on findings?

Practical guidance: start with data flowing into your most critical AI systems or business decisions. Auditing everything at once produces a backlog no team can clear. Prioritize by business impact and AI risk.

On the thresholds in this guide. Every target and blocking number below is a recommended starting point, not a standard. No standards body sets these values, and ISO 8000-8:2015 is explicit that establishing the threshold is the organisation's job rather than the standard's (ISO, 2015). Set yours against the consequence of failure for your use case, and write down the reasoning. Step 9 collects them in one table.


Step 2: Data Profiling — the Diagnostic Layer

Data profiling is automated analysis of a dataset to understand its structure, content, and statistical properties before applying any rules. It answers: what does this data actually look like?

What profiling produces:

  • Row count — volume; detect unexpected drops or spikes
  • Null rate per column — completeness baseline per field
  • Distinct value count — cardinality; detect unexpected proliferation
  • Min / max / mean / stddev — distribution; detect outliers
  • Value frequency distribution — most common values; detect encoding issues
  • Data type confirmation — actual types vs. declared schema
  • Pattern analysis — formats present (date formats, phone formats)
  • Duplicate record rate — uniqueness baseline

What to look for immediately:

  • Null rates above 5% on fields declared as required
  • Sentinel values (-1, 0, 9999, "N/A", "Unknown") suggesting missing data encoded as values
  • Date fields with values in 1900 or 2099 — common default handling artifacts in legacy systems
  • Fields where 80%+ of values are a single value — may indicate a broken pipeline defaulting to a constant
  • Schema mismatches between the data dictionary and what the profiler finds

Step 3: Auditing for Accuracy

Accuracy is the hardest dimension to audit at scale because it requires a reference to compare against. You need to know what the correct value should be to determine whether the value present is wrong.

Four accuracy audit techniques:

Technique 1: Source system comparison

Compare values in the audited dataset against the authoritative source system. Pull a statistically valid sample — at least 5% of records, or 500 records minimum. If failures cluster in a time range or system segment, expand the sample in that area.

Technique 2: Validation rules

Apply domain knowledge as testable rules:

  • Email addresses must match a valid regex pattern
  • Transaction amounts must be greater than zero
  • Order dates must be on or before ship dates
  • Country codes must exist in the ISO 3166-1 standard list
  • Customer status must be one of a defined controlled vocabulary

Rules applied in bulk across an entire dataset are the foundation of automated accuracy checking.

Technique 3: Cross-system consistency check

If the same entity exists in multiple systems, compare corresponding fields. A customer's address in the CRM should match their address in the billing system. Discrepancies identify either data entry errors or transformation bugs. For AI specifically, this detects fields that look accurate in isolation but are inconsistent across the join that forms a training dataset.

Technique 4: Statistical anomaly detection

For numerical data, flag values that deviate significantly from historical distributions. If average order value has been around \$150 for 12 months and a segment suddenly shows \$15,000, that is either a real business event or a data error. Z-score analysis and statistical process control automate this detection.

Accuracy scoring:

Accuracy Score = (Records passing all accuracy rules / Total records audited) x 100

Target for AI training data: 95% or above. Below 90%: block from production AI use pending remediation.


Step 4: Auditing for Completeness

Completeness is more nuanced than null rate. A field can be populated with a value that represents missing — which a null check will not catch.

Technique 1: Null rate analysis by field

For each field, calculate the percentage of records where the value is null or empty. Compare against acceptable thresholds:

  • Primary key: 0% nulls acceptable
  • Required business fields (email, account ID): under 1%
  • Optional enrichment fields: document the rate; context-dependent threshold

Technique 2: Sentinel value detection

Build a sentinel value register for your environment. Common sentinel values:

  • Numeric: -1, 0, 999, 9999, -999
  • String: "N/A", "Unknown", "None", "TBD", "NULL" as a string
  • Date: 1900-01-01, 2099-12-31, 1970-01-01 (Unix epoch default)

Treat sentinel values as nulls in completeness scoring. A field that is 98% complete by null count but 25% sentinel-value is actually 73% complete.

Technique 3: Conditional completeness

Completeness rules that apply when another condition is true:

  • If order status is "shipped" then ship date must not be null
  • If customer type is "enterprise" then contract value must not be null

Flat null rate analysis misses these. Conditional completeness requires SQL-based or code-based assertion logic.

Technique 4: Cross-record completeness

For time-series data, check whether expected records exist. If you expect a transaction record for every active customer every month, and 3% of active customers have no record in March, that is a completeness failure at the record level — not the field level.

Completeness scoring:

Completeness Score = (Required fields populated with valid values /
                      Required fields x Total records) x 100

Target for AI training data: 98% or above for primary fields. Below 95%: flag for steward review.


Step 5: Auditing for Consistency

Consistency asks whether the same entity is represented the same way everywhere. Unlike accuracy, it needs no external reference — the dataset contradicts itself.

Technique 1: Cross-system field agreement

For entities present in more than one system, compare each shared field. Report the agreement rate per field, not per record. A single disagreeing field drags a whole-record measure down and hides which field is actually broken.

Technique 2: Controlled vocabulary drift

Enumerate the distinct values in every categorical field and compare against the controlled vocabulary. Values outside the list are the visible failure. The subtler one is two codes that mean the same thing — CANCELLED and CANCELED, Y and TRUE — which a model treats as unrelated categories.

Technique 3: Structural break detection

Plot the distribution of each categorical field over time. A taxonomy that changed mid-dataset shows as a sharp discontinuity. This matters most for training data: the model learns a relationship that only held on one side of the break.

Technique 4: Referential integrity

Verify that every foreign key resolves to an existing parent record. Orphaned rows mean either a deletion that did not cascade or a join that will silently drop records during feature engineering.

Consistency scoring:

Consistency Score = (Field comparisons in agreement /
                     Total field comparisons performed) x 100

Target for AI training data: 95% or above. Below 90%: block from production AI use pending remediation.


Step 6: Auditing for Timeliness

Timeliness has two separate questions, and a dataset can pass one while failing the other. Is the data current, and does it arrive inside the decision window?

Technique 1: Freshness measurement

For each asset, measure the lag between the real-world event and its availability for query. Report the distribution, not the average. A pipeline with a median lag of two minutes and a 99th percentile of six hours will fail the decisions that matter most.

Technique 2: SLA conformance rate

Where a freshness SLA exists, measure the proportion of intervals that met it. Where no SLA exists, that is the finding — write it up before scoring the dimension.

Technique 3: Decision-window fit

Compare the feature pipeline's delivery time against the time the decision must be made. This is the check that catches batch features wired into a real-time path. The data can be perfectly fresh by its own SLA and still arrive after the decision was needed.

Technique 4: Training-serving skew (if you train your own model)

Confirm that a feature computed at training time uses only information available at inference time. A feature built from a column populated after the event leaks the future into training, and performance drops sharply once the model is deployed.

Timeliness scoring:

Timeliness Score = (Records available inside the decision window /
                    Total records required for the decision) x 100

Target for AI training data: 98% or above. Below 95%: flag for steward review.


Step 7: Auditing for Validity

Validity asks whether values conform to their declared domain — type, format, range, and reference list. It is the cheapest dimension to automate and the one most often skipped.

Technique 1: Schema and type conformance

Assert the declared type of every column and count violations. Text in a numeric field, and timestamps stored as free-text strings, are the common cases.

Technique 2: Range and boundary checks

Define a plausible range per numeric and date field, then count values outside it. Dates in 1900 or 2099 usually indicate legacy default handling rather than real events.

Technique 3: Format and pattern assertions

Apply regex to structured text fields — email, phone, postal code, identifiers. Report the pass rate per field so remediation targets the worst field first.

Technique 4: Reference list membership

Check coded fields against their authoritative list: ISO country codes, an internal product catalogue, a currency table. A code outside the list is invalid regardless of how consistently it appears.

Validity scoring:

Validity Score = (Values conforming to their domain rules /
                  Total values checked) x 100

Target for AI training data: 99% or above. Below 95%: block from production AI use pending remediation.


Step 8: Auditing for Uniqueness

Uniqueness asks whether each real-world entity appears exactly once. Exact-key deduplication is the easy half; the duplicates that damage AI are the ones without a shared key.

Technique 1: Exact duplicate detection

Count records that are byte-identical across all fields, and records sharing a primary key. These are the trivially findable duplicates and should be zero.

Technique 2: Probabilistic entity resolution

Score record pairs on multiple attributes — name, address, contact details — and flag pairs above a match threshold. Tune the threshold against a manually labelled sample before trusting the rate.

Technique 3: Cross-source duplication

When a dataset is assembled from several systems, measure the duplication introduced by the assembly itself. This is where most invisible duplication comes from, and profiling a single source will never surface it.

Technique 4: Train/test leakage check (if you train your own model)

Search for near-duplicate records that landed on both sides of the split. Leakage here inflates evaluation metrics, so the model tests well and then underperforms in production.

Uniqueness scoring:

Uniqueness Score = (Distinct real-world entities identified /
                    Total records in the dataset) x 100

Target for AI training data: 99% or above. Below 97%: block from production AI use pending remediation.


Step 9: Compute the Composite Quality Score

The six dimension scores above combine into one figure for the dataset. The composite is a reporting device, not a gate — the per-dimension gates are what block a dataset.

Choosing the weights

Weights come from the use case's failure mode, not from a house default. Ask which dimension, if it degraded quietly, would do the most damage to this specific use case, and weight that one hardest.

Use case shape Weight the most Why
Real-time decision through a system of record (fraud, pricing, personalisation) Timeliness, accuracy A correct answer delivered after the decision window is a wrong answer
Batch prediction on assembled history (churn, propensity, forecasting) Completeness, consistency Gaps and taxonomy breaks are learned as signal
Entity lookup and record action (service agents, account automation) Uniqueness, validity Acting on the wrong merged record is the failure that reaches a customer

Record the weights and the reasoning alongside the score. A weighting no one can explain is the first thing challenged when the score is used to block a project.

The composite formula

Composite Score = Σ (Dimension Score × Dimension Weight)

Worked example for a batch churn model, weighted toward completeness and consistency:

Dimension Weight Score Weighted Gate
Accuracy 25% 82 20.5 Blocked (below 90)
Completeness 20% 91 18.2 Flagged (below 95)
Consistency 20% 74 14.8 Blocked (below 90)
Timeliness 15% 88 13.2 Flagged (below 95)
Validity 10% 95 9.5 Pass
Uniqueness 10% 78 7.8 Blocked (below 97)
Composite 100% 84.0 Blocked

This dataset scores 84.0 and is not fit for production AI use. Three dimensions sit below their blocking gate, and a reader looking only at the composite would not see any of them. Report the dimension scores beside the composite everywhere the composite appears. On its own, a single number invites exactly the wrong conclusion.

The threshold table

No standards body publishes the numbers below. ISO 8000-8:2015 is explicit that setting a threshold is your job, not the standard's:

When assessing whether the quality of information and data is sufficient, it is necessary to establish the threshold, pertinent to the business, for each object to be measured. This part of ISO 8000 does not set these thresholds. (ISO, 2015)

So treat the table as a starting point for the conversation, not a standard to comply with. It collects the gates used throughout this guide so they sit in one place. Tighten them where the failure consequence is severe, loosen them where it is trivial, and record either move as a governance decision with a named owner and a stated reason. A threshold you cannot justify against your own use case is a number you borrowed.

Dimension Target Flag for review Block from production AI
Accuracy 95%+ below 95% below 90%
Completeness 98%+ (primary fields) below 95%
Consistency 95%+ below 95% below 90%
Timeliness 98%+ below 95%
Validity 99%+ below 99% below 95%
Uniqueness 99%+ below 99% below 97%
Composite 85%+ below 85%

Step 10: Document Findings

For each finding document:

  • Asset — which table, field, or pipeline
  • Dimension — which quality dimension failed
  • Severity — critical (blocks AI use), major (degrades AI quality), minor (cosmetic)
  • Scope — what percentage of records are affected
  • Root cause hypothesis — where in the pipeline did this likely originate
  • Owner — named data steward accountable for remediation
  • Recommended action — specific fix, not a general suggestion
  • AI impact — which models, features, or agents are downstream of this issue

Part 2: Automating Data Quality Governance

Why Manual Audits Do Not Scale

A manual audit conducted quarterly means 87 days of undetected data quality degradation between each check. At AI scale — where agents make decisions continuously based on pipelines that run 24/7 — manual quality processes are not a governance strategy. They are compliance theater that provides the appearance of oversight without the substance.

Automated data quality governance shifts the manual work from running checks to designing checks and resolving issues — the two activities that require human judgment.


The Automation Architecture: Four Layers

Layer 1 — PROFILING AND DISCOVERY Schema, statistics, lineage, catalog. Runs automatically on schedule. Produces continuously updated profiles for every monitored asset.

Layer 2 — TESTING AND VALIDATION Rules as code, CI/CD gates, pipeline checks. Quality rules version-controlled and enforced automatically. Failing rules block the pipeline — they do not produce warnings that get ignored.

Layer 3 — OBSERVABILITY AND ALERTING Drift detection, anomaly alerts, dashboards. ML-powered detection catches failure modes that static rules don't anticipate.

Layer 4 — GOVERNANCE AND REMEDIATION Routing, ownership, SLAs, resolution tracking. Issues automatically routed to named owners with context, SLA clock started, resolution tracked in governance reporting.

Most organizations have Layer 1. Production-grade AI governance requires all four.


Layer 2: Testing and Validation in Practice

The shift-left principle: quality checks run as early in the pipeline as possible. A check at ingestion catches an issue before it propagates to 47 downstream tables and 3 production models.

Rule categories:

Schema rules (dbt):

not_null:
  - customer_id
  - order_date
  - email

Range and validity rules (Great Expectations):

expect_column_values_to_be_between(
    column="transaction_amount",
    min_value=0.01, max_value=1000000
)
expect_column_values_to_match_regex(
    column="email",
    regex="[a-zA-Z0-9._%+-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,}"
)

Conditional completeness (Soda):

checks for orders:
  - missing_count(ship_date) = 0:
      filter: status = 'shipped'
  - missing_count(contract_value) = 0:
      filter: customer_type = 'enterprise'

Cross-table consistency (dbt custom test):

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM orders
WHERE ship_date < order_date
-- Expected result: 0

CI/CD integration: quality tests run before any code change is merged. A PR that introduces a schema change breaking a downstream quality rule is rejected automatically before it reaches production.


Layer 3: ML-Powered Observability

Static rules catch known failure modes. Observability catches unknown ones. ML-powered platforms learn the normal behavior of a data asset and alert when something changes unexpectedly — without requiring a human to have written a rule for every possible failure mode.

What observability monitors:

  • Volume — row count drops or spikes outside normal range
  • Freshness — tables not updated within their expected window
  • Schema drift — columns added, dropped, or type-changed without a code change
  • Distribution shift — field value distributions diverging from historical baseline
  • Null rate change — completeness degrading over time
  • Duplicate rate change — sudden increase in duplicate records

How ML-powered detection works (Monte Carlo model):

  1. Platform reads metadata and statistical signals from connected warehouses via read-only connectors
  2. ML establishes behavioral baselines per asset per metric
  3. Anomalies flagged when current values deviate beyond learned thresholds
  4. Root cause analysis traces the anomaly upstream through lineage
  5. Alert routed to the asset owner with downstream impact shown

Alert design principles:

  • Route to named owners, not generic Slack channels
  • Include downstream impact in the alert — which models, dashboards, agents are affected
  • Classify severity automatically
  • Suppress known false positives (expected volume drops on weekends)
  • Track MTTD and MTTR as governance KPIs

Layer 4: The Automated Remediation Workflow

Detection without remediation is a dashboard that makes people feel bad. The automation loop is only closed when quality issues route to the right person, with context, and with a defined SLA.

Workflow:

  1. Quality check fails or anomaly detected
  2. Severity classified: critical, major, minor
  3. Owner identified via catalog ownership metadata
  4. Ticket created with: asset name, rule failed, % records affected, downstream AI and BI impact, root cause hypothesis
  5. SLA clock starts: critical 4 hours, major 24 hours, minor 72 hours
  6. Owner investigates and applies fix: pipeline bug, source system error, or rule calibration
  7. Quality check re-run to confirm resolution
  8. Resolution logged in catalog quality history
  9. SLA compliance tracked in governance reporting

Escalation policy:

  • SLA breached: escalate to steward's manager and flag in governance dashboard
  • Critical issue affecting live AI: trigger inference pause for affected pipeline pending resolution
  • Recurring pattern: trigger root cause review, not just symptom fix

Governance Metrics to Track

  • Quality score by asset: weighted composite across all dimensions — target 85% or above for AI-eligible assets
  • Accuracy rate: percentage of records passing all accuracy rules — target 95% or above
  • Completeness rate: percentage of required fields populated with valid values — target 98% or above
  • Rule coverage: percentage of AI-critical assets with automated checks — target 100%
  • MTTD: mean time from issue introduction to detection — target under 1 hour for critical assets
  • MTTR: mean time from detection to resolution — target under 4 hours critical, under 24 hours major
  • SLA compliance: percentage of issues resolved within SLA — target 95% or above
  • Recurring issue rate: percentage of issues that recur within 30 days — target under 10%

Part 3: Tooling Stack

No single tool covers all four layers. Most production environments use two to three working together. Here is what each tool actually is, what it does, and where to find it.


Layer 2 — Testing and Validation Tools

dbt (data build tool)

What it is: an open-source transformation framework that lets data teams write SQL-based transformations as version-controlled code. dbt tests are assertions written alongside transformation models — they run automatically every time a transformation runs, validating that outputs meet expectations before downstream systems consume them.

Best for: teams already using dbt for transformation. Zero new infrastructure required.

Limitation: only covers dbt models; no monitoring of production data outside the transformation layer.

Website: https://www.getdbt.com

Open source core. dbt Cloud (managed) starts at \$50/month per developer seat.


Great Expectations

What it is: an open-source Python library for defining, documenting, and validating data quality expectations as code. You write "expectations" — assertions about what your data should look like — and run them against any dataset at any pipeline stage. Expectations are version-controlled, shareable, and runnable in CI/CD pipelines.

Best for: engineering-heavy teams that need highly customizable, code-driven validation integrated into ingestion and CI/CD workflows.

Limitation: requires Python expertise to configure; steeper learning curve than YAML-based tools.

Website: https://greatexpectations.io

Fully open source. GX Cloud (managed UI and scheduling) is available with pricing on request.


Soda

What it is: a data quality platform that lets teams write quality checks in a simple YAML-based syntax (SodaCL) and run them against cloud warehouses. More accessible to non-engineers than Great Expectations while still supporting complex business logic. Includes a UI for collaborative monitoring and a CLI for pipeline integration.

Best for: teams that want a balance between technical flexibility and business-user accessibility. Strong for organizations where data stewards, not just engineers, need to own quality rules.

Website: https://www.soda.io

Open source core (Soda Core). Soda Cloud (managed) pricing on request.


Layer 3 — Observability and Monitoring Tools

Monte Carlo

What it is: an enterprise data observability platform that uses machine learning to automatically detect anomalies in data freshness, volume, schema, and distribution — without requiring manual rule configuration for every scenario. It connects to your data warehouse and BI tools via read-only metadata connectors, learns normal behavior for each asset, and alerts when something deviates. Root cause analysis traces anomalies back through lineage to the likely source pipeline.

Best for: large enterprises with complex multi-system data environments where manual rule coverage is impossible. The gold standard for production data observability at scale.

Limitation: enterprise pricing; best value at scale.

Website: https://www.montecarlodata.com

Enterprise pricing, contact for quote.


Metaplane

What it is: a lightweight data observability platform designed for teams using dbt, Snowflake, and Looker. Automatically detects anomalies in metrics, schema, and data volume, and alerts teams before bad data reaches dashboards or models. Faster to deploy than Monte Carlo with a more accessible price point.

Best for: mid-market teams on a modern dbt-centric stack who need production observability without enterprise-scale complexity.

Website: https://www.metaplane.dev

Starts at approximately \$500/month.


Bigeye

What it is: a data observability platform combining rule-based checks with ML-powered anomaly detection. Deep native integration with Snowflake and BigQuery. Monitors table freshness, volume, distribution, and schema drift. Includes column-level health scores and automatic threshold tuning.

Best for: teams primarily on Snowflake or BigQuery who want a combination of defined rules and automatic ML detection without choosing between the two approaches.

Website: https://www.bigeye.com

Pricing on request.


Layers 1 and 4 — Catalog and Governance Platforms

Atlan

What it is: an active metadata platform that unifies data catalog, data quality governance, lineage, and discovery in a single control plane. Atlan's Data Quality Studio lets teams define and automate quality rules directly in cloud warehouses, with trust signals and alerts embedded in everyday workflows. It integrates upstream tools like Monte Carlo, Soda, and Anomalo to provide a 360-degree quality view. For AI specifically, it serves as the context layer that agents can query programmatically to understand data assets before consuming them.

Best for: organizations that want to replace fragmented point tools with a single governed platform. Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader for Data and Analytics Governance Platforms (2026) and Metadata Management Solutions (2025).

Website: https://atlan.com

Enterprise pricing, contact for quote.


OvalEdge

What it is: an integrated data governance platform covering catalog, lineage, data quality rules, and business glossary management in one product. Applies business and technical rules to ensure data meets defined expectations. Continuously analyzes datasets to surface unexpected changes in structure or completeness. Recognized as a Niche Player in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data and Analytics Governance Platforms.

Best for: enterprises seeking a single governed platform for cataloging, lineage, and quality management at a lower price point than Atlan.

Website: https://www.ovaledge.com

Pricing on request.


Smaller teams and earlier-stage programs:

  • Start with dbt tests plus Great Expectations for Layer 2 (both open source, zero cost to start)
  • Add Soda or Metaplane for Layer 3 observability
  • Use your existing catalog or a manual Notion-based tracker for Layer 4 until volume justifies a dedicated governance platform

Mid-market teams:

  • dbt tests plus Soda for Layer 2
  • Metaplane or Bigeye for Layer 3
  • OvalEdge for Layers 1 and 4

Enterprise:

  • dbt tests plus Great Expectations for Layer 2
  • Monte Carlo for Layer 3
  • Atlan for Layers 1 and 4

Part 4: Implementation Sequence

  • Weeks 1-2: Profile and baseline — run profiling on all AI-critical datasets, document null rates, distributions, sentinel values. Do not write rules yet.
  • Weeks 3-4: Define quality standards — for each asset, define acceptable thresholds per dimension. Get sign-off from data owners. Document in catalog.
  • Weeks 5-6: Write and deploy Layer 2 rules — start with highest-impact assets. Deploy in warning mode first to calibrate thresholds before switching to blocking.
  • Weeks 7-8: Switch to blocking mode and deploy observability — rules now block pipelines. Deploy observability tooling. Tune anomaly detection.
  • Weeks 9-10: Deploy governance workflows — connect alerts to ownership metadata, configure issue routing, stand up governance dashboard. Run a fire drill.
  • Ongoing: Expand coverage, calibrate false positive rates, review recurring issues monthly for root cause patterns.

Readiness Checklist

  • [ ] All AI-critical assets profiled — null rates, distributions, sentinel values documented
  • [ ] Quality thresholds defined and signed off by data owners
  • [ ] Accuracy rules written as code for all required fields
  • [ ] Completeness rules include sentinel value detection, not just null checks
  • [ ] Conditional completeness rules defined for context-dependent fields
  • [ ] All rules integrated into CI/CD pipeline — blocking, not advisory
  • [ ] Shift-left applied — checks at ingestion, not only at consumption
  • [ ] ML-powered observability deployed for production AI-critical assets
  • [ ] Alert routing connected to catalog ownership metadata
  • [ ] SLAs defined by severity
  • [ ] Governance dashboard live — quality scores, issue queue, SLA compliance visible
  • [ ] MTTD and MTTR tracked as operational KPIs
  • [ ] Quality scores tied to AI eligibility — assets below threshold blocked from training pipeline
  • [ ] Full detection-to-resolution loop tested end-to-end

Sources

  • ISO — ISO 8000-8:2015, Data quality — Part 8: Information and data quality: Concepts and measuring, 2015. When assessing whether the quality of information and data is sufficient, it is necessary to establish the threshold, pertinent to the business, for each object to be measured. This part of ISO 8000 does not set these thresholds. View source · verified 2026-08-23 · primary