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Once an application has been deployed, the data that it stores must be properly managed. This includes the usage of the data as well as the data’s integrity. The application data must be managed in an ongoing fashion to ensure it is relevant, accurate and secure.

Your company’s data, especially as it pertains to customers, is your most valuable asset. The costs of unreliable data are derived from a number of events. Some of those events include; incorrect conclusions drawn from data analysis exercises, increased costs through a trial and error method to sift through data for accuracy, and providing customers with incomplete or incorrect information based on faulty data. In addition, unreliable data will encourage your customers, vendors, management and anyone else who has a stake in your enterprise to question your credibility. It only takes a small amount of faulty data to put the entire data set in question. If only 10% of your data is faulty but you don’t know which 10%, you can’t trust any of it.

In the IBM Lotus Notes/Domino environment, data integrity issues such as save/replication conflicts, disconnected links and hidden or lost fields are common. Searching for these errors is labor-intensive and typically occurs only when a problem is reported, if at all. As a result, the integrity of the applications and data is questionable and can put your organization at risk. In order to minimize these risks, policies that ensure the integrity of your data must be implemented.

Since many of the problems related to error detection and monitoring are difficult to do on a large scale, it is important to find ways that will help you do the work. Finding data integrity issues that already exist and being alerted when new errors occur is the best way to ensure you get the most from Notes/Domino. This will also avoid allowing you to get burned by failing an audit.