Application Erosion: More Causes and Cures
Olin Thompson - March 26, 2005

Data Quality and a Cure

The CIO of a midsized company tells us that a symptom of application erosion is the decline in the quality of the data in the system. That decline can be measured in terms of its latency, the time between the physical action (shipping a product) and the time that the database reflects that action. In a real-time system, the latency is zero. In good implementations, the latency is minimal, measured in minutes or maybe hours. As erosion sets in the latency increases to hours or days, as the users find it less important to update the system...