When considering the business value of good data quality, the primary purpose is to make a business more efficient and profitable. The 451 Group research that tabulated the top 5 benefits below included other downstream benefits, such as “better supplier performance” and “more informed decision making.” This blog post will focus on the following benefits that survey respondents reported:
- Increased revenues
- Reduced costs
- Less time spent reconciling data
- Greater confidence in analytical systems
- Increased customer satisfaction
The 451 Research report revealed the following top 5 benefits:
- Increased revenues: When a business is able to make decisions on a foundation of high quality, validated data, positive top-line outcomes are a likely result. Unreliable data results in less confident decisions that can often lead to missteps and rework that don’t deliver increased revenues.
- Reduced costs: If data quality enables an organization to complete a project correctly the first time around, it also enables the organization to operate more efficiently and complete more projects. Project delays due to course corrections burn through budgets and slow business growth.
- Less time spent reconciling data: Manually reconciling data is a time sink that consumes costly resources, as manual reconciliation does not scale. As data sources and associated error rates increase, the law of diminishing returns impedes progress, which implies that rules-based automation can help contain reconciliation time and effort.
- Greater confidence in analytical systems: You would be surprised how often organizations use data in which they have little confidence. The 451 Research study that is referenced at the end of this blog post revealed that 60 percent of executives lack confidence in their organizations’ data quality, yet alarmingly some data, even if flawed is considered to be better than no data when deadlines loom. Data quality tools can ensure only trusted data is used for decision-making, which, in turn, increases confidence in those analytical systems.
- Increased customer satisfaction: Imagine calling your IT service provider and always having to tell it the model number, OS version and patch levels for your PC. It would be much better if the provider always knew the versions of everything you had installed on your system when you called. IT customer service is a very data-intensive operation that benefits greatly from up-to-date, validated information. In the world of IT Service Management (ITSM), knowledge helps to drive customer satisfaction.
You can see from the examples outlined above just how valuable data quality can be to improving business performance and increasing customer service. Blazent’s Data Quality Management (DQM) solutions have evolved to be both comprehensive and easy to consume. 451 Research published results from a survey of 200 IT professionals in their report titled “The State of Enterprise Data Quality: 2016, The Role of DQM in Machine Learning and Predictive Analysis.” You can download this insightful report here.