By Next Year, You’ll Wish You’d Started a Data Quality Program
Have you deferred implementing a data quality initiative for your organization? Do you think a structured approach to data quality is unnecessary or too expensive? It’s time to step back from day-to-day business challenges and think about how your company will operate over the next twelve to twenty-four months. You may decide now is the time to start a data quality process for your company.
We predict over the next two years data will drive your business even more than it does today. Your company is collecting data daily from an ever-increasing number of sources. Regardless of your business category, data produced by sensors, the internet of things (IoT), consumer tracking methods, and more will impact your business. If you are unprepared to use data to streamline operations, bring new products to market, or improve customer experiences your company will lose traction. Nimble competitors could snap up your share of the market.
More Data = New Challenges
All that new data will be useless unless it can be correlated with existing information. Without a purposeful data quality strategy and the right tools, organizations struggle with duplicates, misspellings, missing details, and outdated information. Bad data can undermine strategic planning decisions and actions affecting individual customers. Critical goals like customer retention or lifetime customer value will be in jeopardy.
In the next few years technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence will migrate into mainstream business. Business units, not just Information Technology, will be concerned about how data is collected, validated, and used. These entities will count on high quality data to drive business decisions. They will rely on data quality tools and strategies to ensure the best possible results.
Customer data is constantly changing. If your organization relies on customer information to communicate effectively, sell customers more products, or provide excellent customer service, think about how data items in the list below would impact your business if new customer information was not updated in your systems:
- Mailing address
- Email address
- Phone number
- Marital status
- Number of children at home
- Employer
- Credit rating
- Usage levels, activity, or consumption
- Driver license status
This isn’t a complete list by any means. Other data you maintain in data archives could be vitally important to your company. Data your organization has stored about customers and prospects becomes stale or misleading unless steps are taken to compare, merge, correct, and update the information.
Cost of Bad Data Expected to Rise
Bad data already costs US organizations $700 billion a year in wasted time and unnecessary out-of-pocket expenses. As data volumes rise, and companies use more of it to control how their businesses run, the problem will only get worse.
You don’t want to find yourself buried in data next year, scrambling to find a solution to help you resolve, consolidate, and update the information. Starting a data quality program now will allow your company to access future data streams quickly and accurately, allowing you to start acting on the information sooner–a competitive advantage.
Firstlogic has been helping companies improve the quality of their data for decades. Regardless of the volume or complexity of your data, we have solutions that can help. We’ll analyze your data for you at no-charge and tell you where you can benefit from a data quality improvement strategy.