What is Dirty Data Costing You?

Intrinsically, you know that you need good data. But how far do you need to go? What are the real costs incurred if you DON’T have clean data?

How Bad Can it Be?

The most common data quality question is, “We’re still making money, so how bad can it really be?”

Consider the following scenario. You made the “mistake” of hiring good people. Rock stars, even. They’re smart people, and they want to make sure you keep making money. As processes break and bad reports are generated, they want to fix them. So they do. Herein lies the “mistake.” Now, all kinds of shadow, manual processes are happening in your company to make the data fit-for-use.

This is how data quality affects labor productivity. When data is incorrect, bad things happen. Bills don’t get paid on time, shipments get returned, and so on. That’s not the end of the story, either. Now an employee has to step in and start a new process—for example, one that handles return shipments. When data quality is improved, however, much of this work can be avoided.

Productivity Can be a Hard Sell

First, let’s assume you’ve been capturing your metrics. Turns out, no one’s tracking all the metrics they want. And there’s no one golden metric that’s perfectly defined, monitored, and speaks to high business value.

If you’re one of the many who’s not tracking metrics and constantly reporting business value achieved through your efforts, you can use the Gartner and Ventana statistics below to help you quantify results. How many business initiatives did you undertake last year? How many delivered on-time, on-target, and have increasing adoption? How many do you plan to undertake next year? (Ask your chief intelligence officer or program management office for these numbers.) Then have a discussion. If you’re normal, 40 percent of those projects will fail. Investing in the quality of the information feeding those initiatives is an imperative.

And don’t overlook that second stat. You spend a lot of money hiring smart people, making sure they have great compensation packages, conducting surveys on employee satisfaction, and so on. But are those rock star employees doing rock star work? Or is most of their time spent on data-related tasks to get them access to information? Talent retention is key to IM success.

Executive Momentum

Do you have executive support for your data quality initiative? Do you have support to start figuring out the true extent of your data quality problems? Do you have support from both business and IT in defining pragmatic, high-value solutions to the data quality problems? This level of executive support can be not difficult to attain and also difficult to maintain as executive focus shifts. Aside from becoming a full-time data politician, what can you do? You could get yourself a chief data officer. All the cool kids are doing it.

At a customer meeting this week, only one company even had Data Steward roles defined. None had Data Scientists, much less a Chief Data Officer. What about your company?

By Ina Felsheim, from: http://www.the-decisionfactor.com/information-management/what-is-dirty-data-costing-you/