Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt in your data is a feature of organisations who are failing to effectively manage their information resources. As a result, it is one of the main issues to address when building an information management strategy. How do you know if your organisation is failing? Well, if you’re reading this blog then there is a good chance you already know, but just in case, here are some things to think about. Do you or others in your organisation spend a lot of time:
- Performing work incorrectly or making a wrong decision?
- Re-doing work because it was previously performed incorrectly?
- Recovering from the impact of making a wrong decision?
- Taking unnecessary time to investigate the integrity of the data before using it?
- Performing calculations or reformatting the data before it can be used?
- Hunting for additional information in order to use the data?
- Losing customers because it caused work to be performed incorrectly?
- Causing unrecoverable damage?
- Missing business opportunities?
- Miscommunication within the business or with end customers and other information stakeholders?
If any of these ring true, then there is a good chance that you need to manage information better. How will this help? I’ve identified 7 main benefits that an organisation can realise by managing information better. They are:
- Improved Data Quality – Poor information
management leads to poor data quality and subsequently poorer business
decisions. Early indicators of the business costs of non-quality data (listed
in the bullet list above) point to potentially foregoing revenue as high as
10-20% of the revenue or total budget of the organisation. - Elimination of Duplicate Work – Removing redundancies,
reducing the need for rework and therefore reducing operational costs by
repairing data quality issues that create the need for manual reconciliation
and avoid futile marketing and sales expenditure. On its own, by halving the
costs related to poor data quality, a 5-10% saving on operating expenses can
potentially be achieved. - Unified Vision – or Single Source Of the Truth. Organisations that break
the barriers between their silos of operations can unlock value by obtaining
unified views of business-critical data like customers and products, as well as
apply existing information in new value adding ways such as opportunity identification and
cross selling opportunities. This will improves the ability to coordinate activities between
lines of business. - Broader insights and Better
Decisions – into data across products and business units. Decision makers gain a deeper understanding of operations and an accurate picture of past and
present performance as well as predictions of future performance that shape decisions. - Support More Complex Operations – The ability to serve numerous users with varying requirements at a lower cost. Users include employees from different areas within the
organisation, external suppliers, partners and any other party that may
interact with the company. - Continuous workflow – Continuous workflow with timely information available. This stops people having to wait for information that they require to perform their work and make decisions. Delay can cause lost opportunities or added costs. A well designed information management capability will reduce the lead time an organisation requires to go to market with something new.
- Compliance – Aids compliance to
legislation such as Sarbanes-Oxley as knowing where to find the information
required will decrease the risk of non-compliance and allow for greater
responsibility.
These benefits are pretty fundamental to the competitiveness and sustainability of business in the 21st century. Just remember that although information management may often be talked about in technological terms, the true key to improving performance is found by up-skilling staff so that they are able to take advantage of your technology investments. There is a reason that almost all management and information experts are talking about competing on analytics. My favourite response? A fool with a tool is still a fool – it doesn’t matter how good the data quality.
