At $work I maintain and develop a CMDB and the software that is used to manage it. All of this sounds like very familiar data entry and maintenance problems.

At $work I maintain and develop a CMDB and the software that is used to manage it. All of this sounds like very familiar data entry and maintenance problems. In general, good data quality can only be achieved by giving the people who enter it some incentives, or make it impossible to enter wrong data (then data can still be missing). For example, we have automation that configures monitoring and backup for hosts from our CMDB, and this information tends to be well maintained. Other information that we need e.g. for compliance, but that no automation is tied to, tends to be of much less quality. The second part is the feedback loop: if you enter some data incorrectly, and weeks or months later somebody complains that it's wrong -- that's too far off to efficiently learn from it. We as an industry might have expected better from CAs, but we haven't pressured them into building the necessary feedback loops, or indeed given them incentives to provide higher-quality data in the EV certs.