Wasted Talent and Lost Opportunity: Are Your MBAs Just Sifting Through Data?

By Len Dubois, Sr. Vice President, Marketing & Sales Support, Harte Hanks Trillium Software

It always amazes and gratifies me when clients realize the depth, impact and true costs of poor data quality within their organizations. 

In a recent customer meeting, one of the data stewards was diagramming the architecture and lifecycle process of their information needs within an order-to-cash system.  During the conversation, the steward discussed the types of data that each step in the process required, for example; names and addresses of customers for sales, marketing and shipping applications – product information for billing, inventory control, distribution and shipping – credit and/or payment for the finance department, etc.

In each scenario, data points were added or eliminated based on the contextual need for information for each department.  Representatives from MDM, Data Integration, and SCM all added value to the conversation in terms of completeness, accuracy and structure.

It was at that point when one of the business analysts described what her life was like trying to rectify and assimilate information from the various reports she received in order to answer two primary questions from senior leadership:

• How much new revenue was attributed to new customers last quarter?

• How many new licenses/products were sold to existing customers last quarter? 

She explained that because each business function defined customer, product, and yes, even revenue differently, she spent three of every ten days collecting, assimilating and analyzing reports from across the organization, and aggregating the information within Excel spreadsheets and reports.  Then, and only then, does she feel prepared to provide answers to senior managers. 

This was a simplistic boiling down of the facts in the meeting, but it demonstrated to all that a business analyst (an MBA level employee), whose job it is to analyze data in order to provide information for decision-making, was spending 30 % of her time performing data quality checks on information that previously was thought to have been high quality data.

Like Sonny said in the movie A Bronx Tale, “Wasted talent.”   Imagine the costs and wasted opportunity associated with this manual approach to ensuring high data quality.  Never mind the fact that she is paid to strategize about business processes and how to optimize business results and performance, not sift through data looking for data quality problems.  And, realistically, with new data coming in all the time, the data set may never be accurate enough to maximize business results because the manual process is never-ending. 

I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but this is a real live situation involving a company that really did not understand the impact of data quality ON THE BUSINESS.  And unfortunately, this lack of communication between IT and business happens all the time.  There is so much opportunity to utilize data quality tools to solve real, live business problems in so many companies.  But you have to communicate across business and IT lines, constantly measure results, and ensure data is analyzed, cleansed and reported on in real time to answer the big business and revenue questions that senior management will ask you. 

How are you breaking down the barriers between IT and business users to eliminate wasted opportunity?  Would love to hear about your ideas and anecdotes.