By Len Dubois, Sr. Vice President, Marketing & Sales Support, Harte Hanks Trillium Software
When your company plans to spend $5 million for a strategic data management, warehousing or BI solution, you better be taking an extremely close look at the information and data that feeds that solution. Take data quality lightly at your peril.
Data is one of the most important assets in your company, and its quality needs to be clearly understood at all times as it flows through your organization. Yet, some companies see data quality as simply a commodity to be “checked off” as part of some RFP, instead of a strategic, unique part of your business. Data quality doesn’t lend itself to being a commodity, especially when evaluating the impact of data quality on your company’s operational performance.
Industry analyst firm Gartner says in research from August that companies are losing an average of $8 million annually because of data quality problems. Do you think data quality is just a check box now?
Former customers of the “mega-vendors” tell me these software providers say they “understand data quality” and “we do data quality.” But, chances are, they will not meet your expectations if you ask them to explain how their data quality solution will solve your unique business challenge. They may think they do, but they’re simply treating data quality as a component of an ETL process and will fall negligently short of goal in an operational environment. Their perception will hurt your business, so get under the hood, or better yet, make them get under the hood to define their data quality solution. You will be surprised by their lack of knowledge.
Our advice; be vigilant and advocate on your own behalf for the most comprehensive solution that meets your business needs. Demand a solution that:
- Solves the challenges inherent in multi-domain applications…. companies have data touching virtually every part of the business,
- Maps, both methodologically and physically, to your existing and future business processes,
- Demonstrates the ability to grow as your company changes and grows – it can handle 50 million records today, can it handle 150 million tomorrow?
- Is application-agnostic, and integrates with existing and future applications and infrastructure,
- Will be your data quality partner….one who is knowledgeable and understands all your inherent challenges and how they relate to your business.
If your data quality partner can’t explain to you how data and information changes at every stage of the data lifecycle – from the moment it enters your systems until it is archived – than you will have made the wrong choice. Data changes and manifests itself in many different ways as it flows from point-of-entry through sales, marketing, billing, manufacturing and shipping departments.
Your data quality partner needs to be able to clearly tell you what data gets added, what gets taken away, what needs to be verified and how, and what must be reported on.
So, just because you think you checked off that box on the initial RFP, does not mean you really solved your data quality problems?
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