Data is more than bits and bytes in a database: it can tell you a lot about the health of your business and business processes.
No, I’m not confessing to having a “thing” for the android in Star trek: The Next Generation – I’m talking about the data that fuels businesses in the information age. Some people would have you believe that data is boring, just a collection of bits and bytes in a database, but it is far more than that to me. Data is Money. Data is Knowledge. Data is People.
Profiling and analysing a companies data can tell you so much about the health of the business and its business processes. These techniques allow you to identify and diagnose business maladies just as a doctor uses blood tests and scans to investigate human ailments. Data quality tools like dn:Director not only provide you with the ability to carry out an initial examination and diagnosis, but to continually assess the health of data: it’s like hooking your business up to a heart monitor.
Of course human doctors don’t just treat symptoms of an illness, they tackle the disease itself and the same is true for the data doctor. Identifying and treating the root causes of data issues is essential if you don’t want to get lost in a cycle of data cleansing, scrap and rework. This means attending to the business processes, procedures and controls as well as operating on the data.