Data quality is key to helping companies grow and offering them the best possible service to their customers. It can also be instrumental in helping vulnerable individuals in many sectors, including law enforcement.
As a global group, Experian powers data-driven opportunities for businesses worldwide. In the UK, Experian works with the West Yorkshire Police, a regional law enforcement agency. West Yorkshire Police is very reliant upon the quality of the data it holds. Any name that is recorded could be linked to victims of crimes, witnesses, or suspects. If the data isn’t accurate, it can lead to errors in the assessment of threat, harm, and risk.
Challenges
In the UK, the past few years have seen the acquisition of the data inaccuracies increase exponentially. Data collected by law enforcement comes from a multitude of sources and in a vast variety of formats, which results in a significant volume of duplicates and incomplete records. This can potentially result in delays which could impact ongoing investigations. The team of Data Quality Officers at West Yorkshire Police have been actively tackling this problem. As each police force operates and manages their data quality independently, solving duplicates and data quality issues had proven to be extremely time-consuming. For each record impacted, the Data Quality team would have to review, examine, and correct the record at the rate of 4-5 errors an hour for each member of the team. Due to the volume of duplicates and incomplete records to resolve, the team took a reactive approach to data quality and dealt with issues on a come-to-notice basis. The team worked out that it would have taken 2.5 years to manually correct all data errors with existing resource levels.
Solution
After hearing about the data quality improvements Cleveland Police, another UK-based law enforcement agency, had made working with Experian, West Yorkshire Police decided to have Experian review their data and evaluate how they could improve data quality. Experian’s data assessment provided a breakdown of the data and showed a prediction of the number of duplicates and incomplete records in the data. As a result, West Yorkshire Police implemented Experian Aperture Data Studio to help:
- Reduce duplication of records
Machine learning simplifies complex tasks such as address validation and finding duplicates and also helps with data tagging and identifying sensitive data. - Improve quality of data
Experian Aperture Data Studio combines self-service data quality and globally curated data sets in an intelligent data quality and enrichment platform and empowers modern data practitioners to rapidly build the most consistent, accurate, and holistic view of customers. - Prevent bad data from entering the system
Experian Aperture Data Studio is designed to help you tackle your most pressing data quality challenges, from gaining a single customer view to improving operational data quality, assisting with data duplicates and enhancing accuracy in reporting.
Results
The impact of Experian Aperture Data Studio has been immediate. From 4-5 records per hour, the Data Quality team has managed to save time and increase productivity by 600%.
