Immelman crowned Masters champion!

Congratulations to South African Trevor Immelman who secured a maiden major title win today with a three-shot victory at the 72nd Masters Golf tournament at Augusta.

If you are a golf fan it was for sure a quality weekend in front of the TV.

If you were immersed in the golf, waiting for Tiger to yet again make a run for the championship, did you ever find yourself wondering where on earth do the commentators get all those performance statistics from that they continuously feed you during their commentary?

Well check out the article on “How the PGA Tour Manages Its Data” to see how “IT Chief Steve Evans relies on legions of golf-crazed volunteers, high-tech lasers and the input of golf pros to help him identify, manage and display the Tour's most critical data.”

Thomas Wailgum’s article provides interesting insight into the efforts made to capture data real-time from the field, then to translate it into interesting statistics that both the general public can hear about to enhance their golf watching experience, as well as players on the course to not just help them track their progress but also help them evaluate their risk exposure when contemplating their next shot.

The system used is ShotLink, a revolutionary system that “tracks every shot at every event—where a player's golf ball starts and lands, and all the ground covered in between.” ShotLink requires the use of over 1000 volunteers out on the course to help “capture” the required data on over 32,000 shots which is feed into the system.

Impressively in the article Mr. Evans states that through some minor modification to ShotLink they have been able to ensure a very high level of data quality in the statistics that they produce. He states that “Our goal is to have any data corrections made inside of one minute, and we consistently meet that metric.”

How accurate is the data that you use? What data quality manaagement process do you have in place? Do you tend to resolve data quality issues upstream at its source, or do you cleanse within the applications your report from, or "tweak" the actual reports?