IBM Software

Data Sheet

IBM InfoSphere
QualityStage
Investigate, cleanse and manage high-quality
data to deliver better business results

Highlights

Investigates data to identify the as-is

level of data quality and determine
quality issues

Enforces standardization, matching

and data survivorship rules for core
business entities

Matches customer, vendor, product and

location data based on an organizations
business rules, enabling an accurate,
consistent view across the enterprise

Processes global data on a massively

scalable parallel platform for
optimal performance

Delivers reliable, high-quality data to

critical enterprise initiatives to enable
success in both batch architectures and
Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs)

Get the most out of your organizations

information assets
Organizations need to make sense of the mountains of information in
their operational systems. A clear understanding of customers, products,
partners and suppliers makes the difference between growing a business
and failing to compete. Without clean, standardized and accurate data,
that clear understanding cannot be achieved. In turn, poor data quality
contaminates and undermines critical business initiatives, such as
information governance, compliance and master data management.
Most organizations, however, have not yet evolved their processes,
policies and infrastructure to enable high data quality. To address this
need, organizations are increasingly adopting information governance,
a quality-control discipline that adds new rigor to the process of
defining common terminology and managing, using, improving and
protecting information. Effective information governance can enhance
the quality, availability and integrity of a companys data by fostering
cross-organizational collaboration and structured policy making.
Data quality is a key part of information governance and is a core
discipline within the IBM InfoSphere Information Server
platform, helping to enable the delivery of consistent, accurate,
trusted information. With the InfoSphere Information Server data
integration platform, IBM delivers a wide range of data quality
capabilities, from data profiling, standardization and matching to
active data quality monitoring.

IBM Software
Data Sheet

InfoSphere QualityStage:
A path to data quality benefits

Organizations focus on different aspects of data quality at

different points in time; InfoSphere Information Server
provides several capabilities that address data quality needs
for each of those touch points.

InfoSphere QualityStage is designed to deliver high-quality

data and help organizations reap related benefits, including:

IBM InfoSphere QualityStage, part of the InfoSphere

Information Server data integration platform, focuses on
cleansing data: it enables enterprises to create and maintain
accurate views of key entities, including customers, vendors,
locations and products. Core InfoSphere QualityStage
capabilities include data investigation, standardization, address
verification, probabilistic matching, data survivorship and data
enrichment. InfoSphere QualityStage may be deployed in
transactional, operational or analytic environments, in batch
or in real time.

IBM InfoSphere Information Analyzer, also part of the

InfoSphere Information Server platform, delivers another set
of data quality enhancement capabilities to help clients
understand, analyze and monitor data. With integrated
rules analysis, exception management and an intuitive user
interface, clients can maintain high-quality data to help
achieve business objectives. For more information about
InfoSphere Information Analyzer, visit: ibm.com/software/

Improved return on investment (ROI)

Reduced time, cost and risk of implementing enterprise
resource planning (ERP), customer relationship
management (CRM), data warehousing, business
intelligence, master data management and other strategic
IT initiatives
Cleansed, consolidated customer and household views that
support cross-selling and up-selling efforts
Improved customer support and service, with the ability to
identify the most profitable customers
Consolidated views of suppliers, parts and products for more
efficient analysis, procurement and inventory management
Tight integration with the broader InfoSphere Information
Server data integration platform, enabling a holistic
approach that makes data quality a key component of
data integration

Figures 1 and 2 show examples of how InfoSphere

QualityStage can help standardize and transform data.

data/integration/information-analyzer

Standardization parts
Input file:
Operation Work Instruction
WING ASSY DRILL 4 HOLE USE 5J868A HEXBOLT 1/4 INCH
WING ASSEMBLY, USE 5J868-A HEX BOLT .25- DRILL FOUR HOLES
USE 4 5J868A BOLTS (HEX .25) - DRILL HOLES FOR EACH ON WING ASSEM
RUDER, TAP 6 WHOLES, SECURE W/KL2301 RIVETS (10 CM)
Result file:
Assembly

Instruction

Qty

Type

Part

Size

Measure

SKU

WING

DRILL

HOLES

HEXBOLT

.25

INCH

5J868A

WING

DRILL

HOLES

HEXBOLT

.25

INCH

5J868A

WING

DRILL

HOLES

HEXBOLT

.25

INCH

5J868A

RUDDER

DRILL

HOLES

RIVET

10

CM

KL2301

Figure 1. An example of product parts standardization

IBM Software
Data Sheet

Classic transformation: account to customer

Account view
Source

Legacy Key

Name

Address

Phone

Birth Date

Life

70328574

John Smith Jr.

10 Main St Boston MA 02110

781-259-9945

02/05/1940

Home

80328575

Mr. John Smith

10 Main St Unit 10 Boston MA 02111

617-259-9000

Auto

90238495

J. Smyth

Main St Bostan Mass 02110

781-295-9945

Cust-ID

02/05/1941

Link related records to create cross-reference IDs

Customer view
Source

Legacy Key

Name

Address

Phone

Birth Date

Cust-ID

Life

70328574

John Smith Jr.

10 Main St Boston MA 02110

781-259-9945

02/05/1940

0001

Home

80328575

Mr. John Smith

10 Main St Unit 10 Boston MA 02111

617-259-9000

Auto

90238495

J. Smyth

Main St Bostan Mass 02110

781-295-9945

Legacy Key

02/05/1941

0002

Create a customer profile with the best information from all sources

Customer profile
Source

0001

Name

Address

Phone

Birth Date

Cust-ID

CP

Mr. John Smith Jr.

10 Main St Unit 10 Boston MA 02111

617-259-9000

02/05/1940

0001

CP

J. Smyth

Main St Bostan Mass 02110

781-295-9945

02/05/1941

0002

Figure 2. An example of data transformation

Next, the powerful matching capabilities of InfoSphere

QualityStage detect duplication and relationships in the data,
despite anomalous, inconsistent or missing data values. A
unique statistical matching engine assesses the probability
that two or more sets of data values refer to the same business
entityproviding extremely accurate match results. These
capabilities are delivered in an integrated design environment
with transformation technology, which helps embed data
quality into critical information integration processes.

Organizations must ensure that strategic systems deliver

accurate, comprehensive information that business users
across the enterprise can trust. Through its easy-to-use,
customizable user interface, InfoSphere QualityStage helps
business users gain control over international names and
addresses, and related data such as phone numbers, birth
dates, email addresses and other descriptive comment fields.
InfoSphere QualityStage uses highly accurate probabilistic
matching algorithms to match data elements and discover
relationships among themin enterprise and Internet
environments, and for batch and real-time processing.

Once a match is confirmed, InfoSphere QualityStage

constructs linking keys so users can complete a transaction
or load a target system with true entity integrity, and can
view related data as information. By using the data quality
enhancement capabilities of InfoSphere Information Server
during initial loads and system updates and during real-time
data input, companies gain access to accurate, consistent,
consolidated views of any individual or business entity and its
relationships across the enterprise. This powerful matching
and data cleansing occurs within a scalable parallel processing
frameworkproviding world-class performance designed for
the requirements of extended enterprises.

From disparate-source data to

high-quality information about
core business entities
By performing character-level analysis, InfoSphere
QualityStage helps uncover anomalous and buried
data prior to transforming it for database loading or
transaction processing. First, data from disparate sources
is standardized into fixed fields, and business-driven
rules assign the correct semantic meaning to the input
data in order to facilitate matching.

IBM Software
Data Sheet

Data quality within a unified platform

As part of the InfoSphere Information Server platform,
InfoSphere QualityStage delivers important data quality
functions within the context of a complete information
integration platform. It leverages unified installation,
deployment and source control for rapid startup as well as
unified data quality and transformation functionsin
combination with IBM InfoSphere DataStageto help
reduce the development time for integration projects and
help ensure the quality of delivered data.

InfoSphere QualityStage features

Easy-to-use, integrated and intuitive point-and-click

user interface for specifying automated data quality
processes: data investigation, standardization, matching
and survivorship

Enhanced Match Designer tool that enables easier setup

and greater flexibility

Global address cleansing, validation, certification (for

specific localities) and geolocation

Standardization and match reporting to gain greater

insight into your data quality process and improve the
quality of deployments

Additional standardization rules to set coverage for Latin

America, the Netherlands and India, as well as coverage
for traditional Chinese and Japanese kana

Rules-set acceleration for product data

SOA for creation of data quality services for

real-time deployment

Powerful, accurate matching based on probabilistic

matching technology and a full spectrum of fuzzy
matching capabilities that are easy to set up and maintain

Rigorous, scientific justification of matching, plus easy

auditing and validation

Efficient runtime and system resource usage and

massive scalability

Full integration with other InfoSphere Information Server

capabilities including shared metadata, data monitoring,
profiling and transformation

Active shared metadata across the InfoSphere Information

Server platform helps simplify the collection and management
of metadata over the entire integration spectrum. Metadata
from InfoSphere Information Analyzer can be shared and
leveraged within InfoSphere QualityStage, enabling superior
collaboration. This level of integration can result in significant
benefits, including greater confidence in the consistency of
information and the ability to perform impact analysis across
InfoSphere Information Server.

Data quality and information governance

Information governance can enhance the quality, availability and
integrity of a companys data and foster cross-organizational
collaboration and structured policy making. Applied consistently,
it can help balance factional silos with organizational interest,
directly impacting four of the most important objectives of any
business: increasing revenue, lowering costs, reducing risks and
increasing confidence in its data. Additionally, information
governance allows an organization to monitor its information
supply chain as an end-to-end system, helping to ensure that
information is consistently defined and well understood; reliable
and of high quality; managed throughout its life cycle; and
protected wherever it lies.
InfoSphere Information Server, InfoSphere QualityStage
and InfoSphere Information Analyzer deliver the data quality
functionality organizations need to institute and enable
information governance policies.

IBM Software
Data Sheet

InfoSphere Information Server

delivers value

A forum for information governance

Organizations face ongoing challenges with information:

Where is it? How do I get it when I need it, in the form I need?
Can I trust it? How do I control it? The hurdles continue
to mount if businesses cannot ensure that they have access to
authoritative, consistent, timely and complete information.

Now more than ever, data protection and management is

a universal business concern. To help organizations better
understand the emerging information governance field, IBM
created a leadership forum in November 2004 for chief data
officers and security, risk, compliance and privacy officers
concerned about information governance issues.

InfoSphere Information Server is a market-leading data

integration platform that helps organizations derive more value
from the complex, heterogeneous information spread across
their systems. It enables an organization to integrate disparate
data and deliver trusted information wherever and whenever
needed, in line and in context, to specific people, applications
and processes. It helps business and IT personnel collaborate
to understand the meaning, structure and content of any
type of information across any range of sources. It provides
breakthrough productivity and performance for cleansing,
transforming and moving this information consistently and
securely throughout the enterprise, so it can be accessed
and used in new ways to drive innovation, increase operational
efficiency and help lower risk.

Since then, the IBM Information Governance Council has

steadily grown to comprise nearly 55 leading companies,
universities and IBM Business Partners, including large
financial institutions, telecommunications organizations,
retailers and government agencies. The Council designed
a framework to help businesses understand the core
and supporting disciplines and the enablers of information
governance. It also produced a maturity model to help
assess information governance within an organization. To
broaden involvement in the Council, IBM launched an online
community to encourage organizations to participate, using
crowdsourcing technology to further enhance the maturity
model and information governance as a whole.
For more information on the IBM Information Governance
Council, please visit: www.infogovcommunity.com

For more information

To learn more about InfoSphere QualityStage, including detailed
hardware and software system requirements, please contact
your IBM marketing representative or IBM Business Partner,
or visit: ibm.com/software/data/infosphere/qualitystage
For more information about data quality solutions from
IBM, visit: ibm.com/software/data/integration/capabilities/
cleanse.html

To learn more about InfoSphere Information Server or other

IBM information integration solutions, please contact your
IBM marketing representative or IBM Business Partner, or
visit: ibm.com/software/data/integration

 Copyright IBM Corporation 2011

IBM Software Group
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U.S.A.
Produced in the United States of America
February 2011
All Rights Reserved
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References in this publication to IBM products or services do not imply
that IBM intends to make them available in all countries in which IBM
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subject to change or withdrawal without notice, and represent goals and
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