In the C-Suite: Digital Gold
Are you aware that you have an asset that:
- Is significant enough to warrant representation on the balance sheet
- You have invested in heavily – and continue to do so
- Has a shelf life – although its value may increase before it goes into decay
- Is largely ungoverned
- Its absence could lead to your imprisonment
- Is easily contaminated and thus potentially a liability?
Read my latest Financial Times piece for more details. Click here.
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Ade – Agree very much with your FT article. It’s actually quite staggering how few large businesses take sufficient care of their ‘digital gold,’ when as you say, poor data is worse than no data!
But CIOs and CEOs do take interest when made aware of the £millions badly cared for data is costing their businesses.
A survey by analyst group Gartner of 140 larger companies put the average cost per company of badly cared for data at $8.1 million annually. 22% of the companies estimated they were losing nearer $20m per annum through poor data and 4% thought $100m was a better estimate!
Lost sales, high direct marketing costs, inefficient supply chains and incomplete view of business risk are some of the problems businesses incur.
My company, Trillium Software, works with large, often global companies worldwide to ensure a single enterprise process for data quality governance. Good data quality practices enable information and intelligence that they can trust in making decisions. Good data quality practices ensure key business processes run efficiently. Good data quality helps banks and insurers profile and declare to regulators their lending and investment risks accurately.
A big part of the problem is that large businesses rarely measure and report data quality to the board. But with £millions at stake, perhaps they should.
This article suggests what to measure, so you’ll know whether bad data quality is a threat (or not), to your business:
https://www.dataqualitypro.com/data-quality-home/using-metrics-to-assert-a-business-case-for-data-quality.html
Ed Wrazen
Harte-Hanks Trillium Software
https://www.trilliumsoftware.com
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Thanks for your comments Ed. Interesting numbers.