Data quality is to the information society what quality of materials and products are to the production society. The quality of data in a business is a deciding competitive parameter, and this recognition is currently spreading among businesses throughout the world.

The technological development has generally, along with the development of ERP systems such as SAP, made it possible for businesses to produce, modify and disseminate enormous amounts of data. These data often form the basis for decision making, financial reporting and controlling liquidity, products, clients and suppliers.

Suppose you want/need to improve performance across your enterprise. As you pursue organizational excellence, there are many improvement models, standards, and approaches available. Each might help with part of the business, or address selected compliance requirements, but using several separately can be expensive, confusing, and ineffective. How can an enterprise reap the benefits of the knowledge in a bewildering variety of standards and models? How can this be done efficiently and effectively?

How should information be organized? Better yet, how should it be organized for innovation? 

As BPM takes hold, organizations are finally beginning to acknowledge the need for a common language for process description, something that allows a broad base of users spanning departments, geographies – both business and IT – to look at a process diagram and understand what it says.  And in BPMN, the business process modeling notation standard from OMG, we finally have near-unanimous acceptance from tools vendors of what that language looks like. 

Version 1.x of the standard is supported by the majority of BPM Suite vendors as a front end to process implementation tools, as well