WAKING UP TO DATA QUALITY

Bad data impacts managers and their companies far more than most realise today and presents an enormous hurdle for any data strategy. They can take many simple steps to improve, but they must first “wake up” to the issue. Here, we present three ways that can help them do so.

Most managers are vaguely aware that data quality is an issue. They may hear of re-stated financial statements, difficulties in meeting regulatory issues such as GDPR, or technical issues involving systems that do not interconnect. Even though they themselves may be victimised by bad data from time to time, they see the issues as “belonging to someone else” and assume there is little they can do about them anyway.

The reality is completely different. Bad data hurts managers, the people that report to them, their departments, and their companies every day, wasting time, adding enormous expense, compromising decisions, and generally making anything they do more difficult. Further, through their inattention, they both contribute to their own problems and to data quality issues that impact others. All managers can, and must, take some rather simple steps to address data quality. Fortunately, over the last thirty years, the basic frameworks, approaches, methods and organisational structures needed to attack data quality have worked and proven themselves.

This article aims to help managers and executives “wake up” to data quality, in three ways. First, it relays the stories of those who’ve made their first-ever data