Information Quality Establishes Value

Right from the start, Acxiom Corporation saw the value in financially supporting the new Information Quality program at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. As the world leader in data management, Acxiom had executives who recognized that developing a graduate program in Information Quality just a few miles away from its global headquarters in Little Rock would provide outstanding professional development opportunities for its employees in the data quality field and also help build a skilled local workforce from which they could hire later.

Thus was born the world’s first master’s program in Information Quality (IQ). Three years later, UALR’s master’s program is still one of only two of in the world – the other is at the University of Westminster’s School of Informatics in London – and UALR’s Ph.D. program in information quality offers the world’s only doctoral degree in the subject.

“Information quality is information that fits your use,” says Richard Wang of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the professor and institution that both were instrumental in establishing UALR’s program. “In order for information to be fit for your use, it has to be timely, and you have to believe it.”

That’s it, he says. Simple. But the discipline is not as straightforward as it sounds. Driven by the massive accumulation of data in the internet age, the field is new and still being defined. It can seem abstract and overwhelmingly technical. UALR’s program was established in 2006 as part of the Information Science department in the Donaghey College of Engineering and Information Technology. It teaches students to clean data and present it for maximized use. Assuring information quality requires defining, measuring, analyzing and improving all aspects of information – believability, timeliness, completeness, consistency, ease of understanding, accessibility, and security.

Information Quality is a graduate program only, offering a Graduate Certificate, a Master of Science, and the Applied Science Ph.D. The programs are designed to meet government and private industry’s growing demand for qualified professionals who understand the concepts, tools and models needed to analyze and improve the information they store and the information they produce. Students learn to develop information quality policies and strategies as well as to apply information quality to data privacy and protection, data governance, information architecture and data integration processes.

That’s a lot of jargon. “But really,” says John Talburt, founding chair of UALR’s Information Quality program, “the concept has been in the back of most information consumers’ minds for years.”

“In a nutshell, information quality is helping organizations maximize the value of their information assets,” Talburt explains. “That’s really becoming important. There has been a shift going on in IT from the ‘T’ in technology to the ‘I’ in information. The technology part – equipment, especially high-performance computing – is becoming a common commodity, and what people are now focused on is the value of the information. It’s interesting that we’re so far along in the so-called ‘information age,’ yet people are just now paying attention to information.”

As an academic discipline, information quality’s history goes back to MIT and Richard Wang. In the 1990s, Wang was part of MIT’s information technology faculty. He organized the first International Conference on Information Quality at MIT in 1996, and his name has since become identified with the field. MIT, however, did not develop a degree program, but rather a professional program intended to train and equip participants with basic information quality knowledge and tools.

As Wang was beginning to talk about information quality in Boston, Talburt was working at Acxiom in Little Rock. Previously, Talburt had chaired UALR’s computer science department – now also part of the College of Engineering and Information Technology. Given Acxiom’s cachet in acquiring and managing vast amounts of information, Talburt invited Wang to deliver a talk to his colleagues. Acxiom chief executive officer Charles Morgan was particularly interested in Wang’s research. Mary Good, who by then was dean of UALR’s College of Engineering and Information Technology, serves on Acxiom’s board of directors. This meeting of the minds would turn out to be no small coincidence.

“Dr. Wang had this idea that because MIT only had a professional program, it would be great to have a degree program here,” Talburt recalls. “So in 2005, we decided to try to start up the first degree program in information quality. Dr. Good offered to house it at UALR, Dr. Wang offered to provide all the intellectual property he had developed in his professional courses, and Acxiom provided initial start-up money – $750,000.”

Acxiom was so enthralled by the concept that the company let Talburt leave his post to return to UALR as head of the new program. Acxiom’s contribution paid his salary, and financed scholarships and supported Wang’s salary as UALR Visiting University Professor of Information Quality and his travel to and from Boston.

Once the program was approved by Arkansas’s Department of Higher Education in 2006, the first class of 25 students enrolled. In three years, the program has grown to 81 students, 18 of whom are pursuing their Ph.Ds.

“When most people think of computing as a discipline, they usually think of computer science,” Talburt says. “But that’s focused primarily on processing, things like algorithms, programming, languages, parallel processing and the theory of computation. Information science is a new discipline that has grown up to focus on information itself – databases, data mining, web technology, social computing, and now, information quality. Any time you’re looking at a lot of information, you have to look at information quality.”

As a graduate-level program, Information Quality often draws students who are already full-time working professionals. They seek the Information Quality degree to validate and augment current skills. Classes are scheduled in the late afternoon and evening so students can continue working while enrolled.

“A lot of them are already working in information quality sorts of things, and now that the degree is available, they want the degree,” Talburt says. Other students, many of whom are from outside the United States and supported by grants, attend the program full-time.

With the skills they acquire in data management, some graduates have been able to help their employers – including the Arkansas Department of Education and the Arkansas Department of Information Systems – save millions of dollars in expenses. Today’s economic downturn has shed light on why ensuring data control, quality and efficiency is critical.

Graduates become Information Quality Managers, Information Quality Analysts, Information Quality Consultants and Information Quality Application Developers, or embark on careers to start their own companies or work in teaching or research.

“The U.S. Army, the intelligence community, the federal government and the private sector all must trust data – they have to have confidence in the data they use, and the data has to be timely,” Wang says. “The government is now setting that up as a part of its institutional requirements. The private sector has been doing the same, and increasingly, faculty positions in Information Quality are being posted at leading institutions worldwide. That helps our MSIQ and Ph.D. graduates get jobs, because just developing more information systems doesn’t help until information systems deliver the kind of information to people who need it in time and in such a way that people can believe it and trust it.”

With 30 percent growth in its student population, the program’s faculty and students look forward to their impending move into the College of Engineering and Information Technology’s new, six-story, 115,000 square-foot building, due to open in May 2010.

“One really great component of our program is distance education,” Talburt says, referring to the program’s large number of students who live out-of-state or overseas while enrolled. “We have a very forward-looking way of doing distance education; we call it blended. We take advantage of new technology, so all of our courses are scheduled as on-campus courses, but we also webcast those courses live.”

Students logging in online can see what is projected on the screen in the classroom. They can also interact with the instructor and other class members by voice and written messages. Each class meeting is recorded so that students who have to miss a class can replay it later. The program caters to its students attending remotely from around the United States and internationally.

“The distance education component, along with our partnership with MIT, has really made the program very visible,” Talburt says.

The new building will have two large theater-style classrooms, with improved acoustics, more amenable to such interactive learning.

Not only has Information Quality’s student population experienced substantial growth, so too has its reputation. With Wang’s help and professional connections, UALR’s Information Quality program has developed national importance, with national financial support. In July, Wang led a fund-raising campaign for scholarships that brought in close to $30,000, mostly from outside Arkansas.

“Of course money’s important, but through this drive, we got people to understand that Little Rock has a great program, and that we’re pumping out graduate students for people to hire,” Wang says. “I continuously, 24/7, tirelessly bring in whatever I can for UALR to increase its visibility.”

Wang calls it “name-branding.” Rather than perceive UALR’s and MIT’s programs as competitors, he views the resources and people they are developing as two pieces in a partnership. He envisions UALR becoming the world headquarters for information quality.

“There are so many stars at MIT, there’s no way it can be a focal point,” he says of his own institution’s many renowned programs. “Little Rock’s program is already ahead of any other institution in the world, including MIT. But to create that center of gravity, it’s a function of how the government, industry and university system want to play. I can only take you to the well; whether you drink the water or not, that’s up to you.”

Recently, Wang took a two-year sabbatical from MIT to serve at the Pentagon as Chief Data Quality Officer of the U.S. Army. Given his absence from MIT, the International Conference on Information Quality had to find a new home. The 2009 conference will be held at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, and in 2010, the conference comes to Little Rock.

Wang says his “ability to bring it to Little Rock and to continue to foster Little Rock as the focal point and center of gravity of information quality worldwide” will prove a boon for UALR. While the conference typically brings in only 120-200 attendees, he says, the level of local interest depends on marketing the event and sponsorship support from state government and major Arkansas companies that could benefit from information quality assistance, such as Walmart and Tyson Foods.

Given the program’s unprecedented nature, the research opportunities in information quality seem limitless. Talburt now heads UALR’s Laboratory for Advanced Research in Entity Resolution and Information Quality (ERIQ). This past summer, three professors and four students spent 10 weeks at the Wright Brothers Institute in Dayton, Ohio, collaborating with other students from around the country. Sponsored by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, UALR’s team looked at ways to help the Air Force visualize surveillance information in four dimensions, including time, and to develop information quality tools for surveillance data. In addition to its funding from the Air Force, the ERIQ Lab also is engaged in sponsored research with the Arkansas Department of Education.

“When you are trying to increase the value of information, the way you judge that value is through the person who’s using it,” Talburt explains of catering information quality to the Air Force’s needs. “The user may be a system or an organization. But information doesn’t have any value until it’s applied, so ultimately, the way you measure information quality is by the value that it brings to the organization.

“Now how do you increase that value? That’s where the discipline of information quality comes in.”

Similarly, students and faculty in UALR’s Information Quality program have partnered with the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences to study information quality management practices in the context of health care.

“The whole issue of medical information technology is a big question today; part of it is research, part of it is the application in the sense of: How do you design an IT system that allows medical records and all those sorts of things to be reconciled together,” explains EIT Dean Mary Good.  “When you have very large data sets or complicated systems, you need very high-performance computing facilities and expertise.”

In addition to its degree programs and research, the Information Quality program also seeks to improve the state’s economic development activities through a business incubator for new companies focusing on information quality. The business model for these startup companies is to help organizations derive maximum value from their information assets and improve the quality of their information products.

Several students in the program have started their own information quality consulting businesses. In addition, Alamo Software, a Hot Springs-based business, is working with the program to develop a new line of information quality tools. Another startup, Black Oak Partners, was formed around the information quality program by several former Acxiom executives. Black Oak’s business model is to help large financial institutions and other companies that buy large volumes of data optimize their data acquisition and data analysis processes.

Acxiom is already reaping the benefits of its investment in the program.

“The bottom line is that Acxiom has strategically benefited from the maturity of the EIT program in a variety of ways,” says Jerry Adams, who worked more than 30 years at Acxiom and supported the project to establish the Information Quality program. Adams is now the president and chief executive officer of the Arkansas Research Alliance. “Acxiom has benefited both in recruiting – the key intersection of any company with the university is typically based around recruiting students – and from the Acxiom Laboratory for Applied Research, which is predominantly compensated research at the professor level, supported by graduate students, complying with requests for proposals that we paid for.”

With its graduate program in Information Quality, UALR has the potential to become the leading academic institution in an increasingly significant modern discipline. The full benefits to be gained locally, nationally and around the world – for industry leaders like Acxiom and countless others – have yet to even be discerned.