With the ongoing drawdown of UK forces in Afghanistan, the Data Quality Assessment Tool has been applied to assure the process of equipment recovery. Here, Lt Col Steve Whitlock, ACDS LOGOPS-Log Info Pol SO1 and Paul Lane, UKCeB Task Force Business Consultant, explain how DQAT is delivering benefits.

The drawdown of UK Armed Forces in Afghanistan will see hundreds of thousands of items of military equipment and spares returned to the UK. Keeping track of all this kit is a complex management task. The potential for waste, caused by poor data management, is very significant. It is no surprise then that demonstrating value for money following the recovery remains one of the highest priorities for defence. So how has the Data Quality Assessment Tool (DQAT) been applied to help in this process?

A brief history – the Data Quality Assessment Tool was developed in the light of the UK Council for Electronic Business (UKCeB) ‘Improve Business Performance through Better Data’ project which had identified that past efforts to fix data without addressing the root causes of the problems only resulted in data being corrupted later on. DQAT was developed to address these issues and to deliver an outline action plan to resolve them; it should also lead towards the conditions required to avoid data being compromised in the first place. DQAT helps an organisation understand its approach to data by asking question such as: Do staff understand what data is and do they recognise that they use it? Is data treated as an asset and is it managed as an entity in its own right? These questions, or the answers to them, allow an organisation to assess its overall data maturity level against one of five maturity levels, which then provides an objective, consistent and repeatable test against which progress can be measured.

DQAT has already been deployed in a number of ways. Having recently contracted out elements of its inventory management to an industry partner, an MOD Project Team used DQAT to better understand how its processes and data management activities were performing across an MOD/industry enterprise. A resounding success, DQAT helped both the Project Team and its industry partner to identify and fix potential problems with data and information flows that resulted in lower project risks. In another recent application, DQAT was used to evaluate the procedures within a deployable headquarters. Introduced early in the training cycle, DQAT quickly identified gaps in process and data management activities that were subsequently addressed through training prior to the HQ’s deployment. DQAT directly contributed to establishing taught processes that subsequently went on to deliver success. DQAT has also been used in industry and outside of logistics where an organisation wanted to improve its HR data management.

So, back to the drawdown of UK forces in Afghanistan, where DQAT has been applied at process level to assure the process of equipment recovery.  DQAT shaped the production of the standing orders governing the process and the management of logistic data supporting it. This process is now robust, auditable and capable of delivering the value-based decisions for which it was designed. That would not have been the case had DQAT not been applied.

All logistic decision-making relies on having data of the correct quality. Data is now beginning to be treated as important and is afforded the same status as any other business-critical asset, and DQAT is playing a key role in the improvement process.

Further Information

Further information on DQAT is available from the authors at www.ukceb.org.