ROI Tip 1 - Save operating cost from month 1.

Though our tests in the Nordic Regions it shows that organizations and businesses have from 5-30 percent duplicates in their databases.  What is the price for the duplicates? 

In an article in DM Review Thomas C. Redman comes with this assesment of the cost of bad data:

"Consider first the cost of efforts to find and fix errors. While organizations do, from time to time, conduct massive clean-up exercises, most efforts to find and fix errors are embedded in day-in and day-out work. Over the years, we developed the Rule of Ten: If it costs $1.00 to complete a simple operation when all the data is perfect, then it costs $10.00 when it is not (i.e., late, hard to interpret, incorrect, etc.)."

In my example I will use the price of 1 DKK pr record and 10 DKK for incorrect data.  I will use the conservative 5% duplicate.  

Cost of poor data



The Solution:
I have used the rentalprice of Omikron AddressCenter.  With rental you can deduct the whole cost in the operating costs, whereas if you buy the solution it will be in the investment costs.



Omikron AddressCenter or Data Quality Server is through test proved to be the most intelligent, efficient and easy-to-use tool to find/match duplicates.

Tip 1 to avoid Poor Data Quality - Easy and Efficient monitoring of data entries

Poor data quality can have different sources:

• System inefficiencies. Neither your software or internal control system does not catch the poor data
• We are only humans.  Poor data a entered for sevaral reasons. Typos,  we enter data in wrong fields,  enter 0000000 in postal or telephone fields or just fill in as little as you are allowed to do

doCustomers set up our Data Quality Server to do intelligent continuous cleansing across databases with intelligent search to find customers or adresses.  In theory this will result in clean master database(s), but because of the system inefficencies and the human factor, some poor data is still found.  

We have a feature that can monitor the entries of data.  You can analyze why the poor data is entered, and then be corrected.  A mail is generated every day to a supervisor, that can analyse the result.  If it's human error the person who have entered wrong/insufficient data will be informed so they have a chance to improve their quality.  If it is system ineffiencies this will be corrected.  With this monitoring service the amount of poor data entered is drastically reduced in a short time span.

"Without proper data, BI is meaningless"

This claim is put forward by BI analyst Lyndsay Wise in an article in DM review .

She also writes: "Data cleansing tools are a critical component to ensure that dirty data is not brought into the organization's data warehouse. Non-cleansed data may lead to capturing duplicate, nonvalid records, building reports based on wrong data and decision-making based on inaccurate data. Data quality requires the ongoing management of data cleansing activities to meet and exceed defined data quality standards. Practical applications might include the data being used to run month-end reports or a sales manager using data to monitor the ongoing performance of her sales staff. Lastly, data delivery completes the cycle, distributing the right data at the right time."

The most efficient cleansing tool on the market will be Omikron AddressCenter or Omikron Data Quality Server.  You can also contact me for more information.

Study shows CFO stressed over Poor Data Quality

An IDC study called ‘Understanding Data Quality Needs And Practices In Asia Pacific’ shows that a majority of Finance Executives admitted to facing stress due to Poor Data Quality in their decision making.  22 percent found it highly or quite stressful.

Another interesting aspect of the study is that 30 percent of the respondents spent 8 hours per week or more verifying the accuracy and quality of their data.  That is 20% of the scheduled work time.  If a CFO earns 500.000 DKK a year, that means Bad Data Quality cost 100.000 DKK just on the salary budget for the CFO.

Ian Parker, Product & Solutions Marketing Manager, Business Objects Asia Pacific & Japan says: “Instead of being an asset for finance, the data becomes a major source of angst and frustration, wasting resources, money, and contributing to poor decision making. The report shows that on average across the region, only 60 percent of respondents considered the purchase of a data quality software tool to solve their problem, despite wasting 100-300 hours of their finance executives’ time each year on the issue. One can argue that there are plenty of hidden costs when it comes to data quality and that CFOs should examine how this is affecting their organisation.”

I find this a little disturbing when you can find efficient and inexpensive high quality Software to help lower your stress and get better data.

You can read more about the survey here.

Deloitte's take on Data Quality

I stumbled over this quote from Deloitte:

"Ultimately, poor data quality is like dirt on the windshield. You may be able to drive for a long time with slowly degrading vision, but at some point, you either have to stop and clear the windshield or risk everything."

I like the analogy :-)

Data Quality is not an IT issue

Data Quality is often seen as an IT-Department issue.  It is time to change this perception once and for all.  Data Quality influences all departments in a business. Sales, Logistics, Customer Care, Financial - the list goes on.  You cannot solve the challenges of Data Quality unless all departments are involved.

In my work with organizations and business it is interesting to see that often the ones complaining about poor Data Quality is often the ones that creates the bad data.  Example:  I have worked in various sales organizations, and salespeople are notoriusly shortcutting in entering data. Then they complain about the system when they cannot find the right customer, or the goods are sent to the wrong adress.  To solve this you need the salesmanagers to focus on the problem to help find the right software and solutions together with the IT Department.

To keep the data good, it's important to choose easy to use and efficent software that can be operated by marketing, sales, logistics as well as the IT-Department

CIO's Highest Priority: Business Intelligence

A Gartner Annual CIO report showed that BI applications remain the highest technology priority for CIOs today.

However, only 36% of CIOs believe that management is using the right information to run the business.