You have been called in as a consultant liaison for a dispute between sales, accounting, and IT professionals. The sales professionals are claiming that sales reports are distorted, and are blaming the accounting department for a decrease in their sales bonuses. The accounting professionals have reviewed the sales reports and are concerned that the queries used to retrieve the sales data are not reporting all the sales for each region. So the accounting professionals are blaming the IT staff. The IT professionals reply that they are just doing what they are told. IT claims they are understaffed and doing the best they can shorthanded.
You have been called in to facilitate a resolution of this dispute. When reviewing the database tables used by the sales query, you notice that the names of countries in which sales occurred were not entered consistently. For example, you found that Italy was entered by the French as Italia, by the Italians as Italia, by the Germans as Italian, and by the English as Italy. When the query was run, you notice that the search criterion was Italia.
How do you resolve this dirty data dispute?