InformationWeek:

"Rather than looking at maintaining the integrity of data as a necessary evil, companies should see data quality as a critical business process, and clean data a key product of the business. "You need to build your database around your constituents. [...] Databases created at different times, in different formats, and for different business purposes may look similar, but undocumented assumptions about fields can lead to errors even in hand-checked records. When First Health was importing data from a company that it recently acquired, it thought the data was relatively clean. But then the undocumented data started to create problems."