Abstract

SJ is a government-owned passenger train operator in Sweden. SJcurrently uses a system called Ford for control and monitoring ofmaintenance. Technical and organizational factors have given Ford thecharacter of a monolithic system without flexibility and conditions to meetSJ’s increased requirements. Since Ford cannot be developed to support thenew and changing demands a new system called EAM is introduced. In thiscontext, SJ has the opportunity to evaluate the current data quality in Ford. The purpose of this master’s thesis is to investigate how data quality can bedefined at SJ and to examine the data quality in Ford. This gives SJ anindication of what their quality efforts should focus on in the future. This thesis is based on qualitative research interviews and theories dealingwith data quality. Material from a variety of books and articles togetherform the theoretical framework for the thesis. From the literature relevanttechnical and user centred quality parameters have been selected. SJ’sshifting organization and working methods have been taken into account. Thetechnical data quality parameters are: accuracy, timeliness, completeness andconsistency. The user centred data quality parameters are: accessibility,understandability and believability. These parameters have been used tobetter understand and illustrate the user experience of the data quality inFord and are used to evaluate the current data quality in Ford. This master’s thesis has resulted in a conclusion that data in Ford,according to the technical parameters, is of relatively good quality exceptfrom some specific problems. Even though the users experience the dataquality as low this thesis concludes that the main problems are related tothe user centred aspects rather than to data itself. The quality problems inFord are due to lack of education, the way of working at SJ, the data basestructure of Ford, the user interface and functions.