When you signup for a website. You enter your information (or data). You don’t always get it right and could miss a box or spell your own credentials wrong (garbage), this data in an ICT system is very important that it is minimised. There are numerous ways that this can be accomplished.

Data must be correct

In order to have an accurate IT solution, your data must be correct, otherwise users may find your solution hard to use. It is important that you minimise GIGO through thorough data validation.

Garbage in Garbage Out

When you enter data into an ICT system it is vital that your data is accurate, valid, and up to date. This can be accomplished though input validation. When you enter data, it should be of top quality it is vital that GIGO does not occur. GIGO is garbage in, garbage out, and refers colloquially to the fact that whatever you put into an ICT system, such as garbage, is what you will get out. This is because ICT systems are designed to preform the task that they were designed for, and doing tasks that aren’t what they are supposed to do, will inevitably produce garbage as computers work by logical process. An example of this would be putting an email address in a phone number box on contact information, and when ringing someone, the call does not connect, because it cannot ring an email address.

To stop this sort of thing from happening you must read instructions, follow tutorials and understand the implications of what you are doing, otherwise you could corrupt your data.

Data should be accurate, up-to-date, reliable, complete, correct, designed for purpose and when entered, it should be paramount that it follows these principles, otherwise your it solution could produce frustrating results that the user does not expect. Make sure your data is accourate by forcing users to enter it correctly.