What causes data quality problems? If look at the onion-ring diagram, almost any item in the diagram could have a negative impact on data quality. However, we can divide out arguments about causes into two main camps: hard and soft. These arguments contrast hard, technical causes of data quality problems against soft, human causes.
Looking first at the hard side of the coin, one can see that public managers love to blame data glitches on computer errors, and that some technical problems do arise which affect the data held by IT:
Environmental hazards: High temperatures and high humidity can cause hardware components to break down, thus corrupting data. Static electricity can damage both electro-magnetic components and corrupt data. Dust and smoke can short out components and make moving parts stick, especially damaging disk drives and the data on them. Fire, flood and lightning have a fairly obvious and catastrophic effect on IT-based systems.