Over the holidays I had a chance to settle down to the usual array of Christmas movies and, as ever, Star Trek made an appearance.

Now, I’m no Trekkie. But anyone with even a casual interest in Star Trek over the ages will be aware of the prime directive. This is essentially a mandate or guiding principle that dictates how spacefarers should engage with other civilisations.

This got me thinking about 2014 and how organisations can start adopting their own prime directives for data quality.

Creating your initial data quality prime directives
It’s tempting to buy all the leading data quality books in order to curate and document endless data quality mandates. The problem with this is that you’ll simply create yet another artifact that no one bothers to read. Instead, I recommend you commence with a small set of directives that are meaningful to the entire organisation. Over time you can expand, but keep it simple for now.

Tip: W. Edwards Deming created 14 key principles that acted as his prime directives. Perhaps you can use this for inspiration?

The idea of having a prime directive makes a lot of sense because it introduces the concept of rules into your governance structure. In Star Trek, for example, the only rule that can supercede the Prime Directive is the Omega Directive. Otherwise, the Prime Directive takes precedence.

What will your prime directive look like and what other directives will support it? Perhaps you might state that "data is an asset and as such everyone is accountable for its protection." Supporting this, you may add further directives:

• No data defect must be ignored. Where defects are found, they should be reported and managed.
• Information systems should be designed with data quality principles in mind; rigorous error prevention is mandatory.
• All workers, irrespective of rank and remuneration, are eligible for data quality education and training.

Crowdsourcing your data quality directives
I’ve found that creating directives (or whatever term you choose to use) is not a one-person activity. You don’t need to get bogged down in endless committees, but you do need to open the discussion to the wider organisation. There needs to be a leader who makes the final decision, but diversity is key because you want the language and culture of your organisation to be represented in the directives.

For example, in an earlier organisation I invited the data entry team to discuss our departmental data directives and they were by far the most creative responses we received. They created the directive that all workers must be eligible for training to enable them to perform data quality tasks. That single directive transformed the entire department and, later, the company itself.

What will be your data quality directives for 2014? I welcome your views below. Perhaps we can crowdsource our own list?