Consistency of information across departments in the enterprise is when everyone in the enterprise gets the same answer when they ask the same question.
When different departments across the enterprise try to pull together the answers to the same they may not get the same results for several reasons. An example of data consistency issues is when measuring the total sales at the end of a given month, different departments get different results. There is also the cost of duplicated effort to get to the same answer.
These data consistency issues can be the result of some unknown business rule or change to a calculation may not be propagated across the enterprise. Ask yourself if different department heads present different answers to the same question posed by the CEO, Board or SEC, whose face turns reddest and who ends up in jail.
If there is consistency then there should be no duplication of efforts and there is trust in the appropriate designated parties within the enterprise to provide the appropriate business rules to the Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence team to automate the process of getting to the right answer.
Consistency of data reduces the cost, embarrassment and/or legal liability of information presented to people inside and outside your organization.
Consistency can sometimes be a hard sell when justifying Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence projects. What have your experiences been in trying to justify projects on this merit?
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