Well… about that return flight- I didn’t get to change it.  However, my experience on that trip provided my first real appreciation for data quality and data observability… or lack thereof.  Data quality is kind of obvious: your data still accurate, complete and valid after it was transmitted and arrived at its destination… For a more detailed explanation you can refer to IBM’s official topic page about data quality.  Without maintaining data quality, your data might not do much good since it’s possible that it can’t be used or isn’t accurate by the receiving party.  The way I look at Data Observability is you able observe or monitor your data while it is in flight to make sure that it arrives to its destination accurately or as my colleagues in data or you can refer to a more formal definition here.  If it doesn’t you could take corrective action with your ETL tool.

On this trip I experienced the good and the bad of these concepts in action.  First the good observations.  As I was booking my rental car, I signed up for preferred status at a rental car company.  I put my ‘loyalty’ number into the tool that my company uses to book travel and rented my car- the day of my flight.  Before my flight landed, I received an email welcoming me to the rental company’s loyalty program and that my car would be ready for me when I arrived.  It was nice avoiding a line at the checkout counter and seeing my name on a board with where I could find my car.

On the other hand, I found out that my loyalty number didn’t make it to my airline.  It’s not a huge inconvenience, but I now need to find my itinerary and log onto company’s website to add my trip.  What happened?  Maybe I entered the wrong loyalty number and am the reason why I didn’t receive miles or points for my flights.  After all, garbage in equals garbage out. Maybe my number wasn’t extracted, transformed, and loaded into my airlines database or maybe the data arrived incomplete or in the wrong format at the airline?  While minor it does cause an inconvenience and at scale could cause customer loyalty issues for the airline- which means lost revenue in the future.  If my experience is indicative of the overall customer experience and is one reason why a company might want to invest into a data observability or data quality tool.

To learn more about data observability or data quality feel free to look at the links above.