What does Data Quality mean to you
or perhaps your company? Naturally it’s not surprising opinions differ
depending on the person you ask or for that matter the company. Some
individuals are detail people and in which case if you are one you’ll know data
quality does matter (everything does silly!). It also matters to the
companies out there selling data quality services and software products. Take
BackOffice Associates (BOA) an ERP Data Governance experts who in a recent
conversation concede, often 60% of an organisations data is of poor quality
e.g. out of date, duplicates, mistakes with contact details etc.
Today if you are someone that has to
enter information into a system on a regular basis you may share one of two
observations. One - you are forced to update information by selecting one or
multiple options from a look up list of significant length only to realise none
of them suit. On the other hand you may be in a more liberal environment where
you can freely annotate long rambling scriptures about how the customer is
feeling whilst they were listening to your hold music.
Fast forward another ten years when
the text generation put down their caps, peel off their skinny jeans and
enter the workplace… what will happen then? Will they understand the meaning or
even recognise the words available in the lookups? E magIn f3 txt fieldz!! It
doesn’t bear thinking about!
OK so what does this really mean?
Well I recall an article
a few years ago by Thomas C. Redman that surmised “Poor data quality costs the
typical company at least ten percent (10%) of revenue; twenty percent (20%) is
probably a better estimate.” And this was eight years ago.
Then, now, in the future whether you
endorse a force filed entry or a liberal free text field entry one thing is
certain, mistakes will be made, it's human nature. What would that the 10 or 20%
figure mean to your business? Fifty- sixty thousand? Over hundred? Millions!
Well the good news is, at least you know!
Written by Ben Hedger, Senior Business Development Consultant, DSCallards.
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