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Every now and then, someone will send me a message with an acronym in it, which either I have forgotten or didn’t know.  As it happens a friend of mine ended a message, recently, with ‘GIGO’, which took me a split second to remember, so, I thought I would write it down for future reference.  If nothing else, the writing down of the definition may help me remember it a little faster next time.

What Does GIGO Mean?

Basically, ‘GIGO’ means: Garbage In, Garbage Out

What is the concept of Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO)?

From an Information technology and Information science perspective, the GIGO concept is that poor information coming into a process, will produce poor, unreliable, and inconsistent results; and can even break the process.  Here I used the term information because in the modern information ecosphere the input can be more than just the data, it may be Meta Data, Business rules, information processing, and governance practices, as well as, the source system data.