dataFUD

 

Fear, Uncertainty and Doubting 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 for a dataFUD organisation. 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.

 

As always with my blogs, I may be repeating ideas from one of the many books I have read, websites I visited or methods I use. I stand on the shoulders of giants and acknowledge their original thoughts when I can. I haven't checked if I am directly quoting from them, but the Mike2.0 community has been an inspiration in recent years so you may well find their ideas mixed with mine. As always, any mistakes or controversies are my responsibility alone.

Comments

[Nagore]

RE: RE: Are you basing that on ahynting except a visual inspection? I would strongly disagree that the distribution looks like a log-normal. An inverse-chi-square distribution would make more sense. The random variable is the price. If one could show that the distribution of individuals' buying power in King County looks approximately like a chi-square distribution, then an inverse-chi-square would show the distribution of houses expected to be bought. The expected median price is straightforward to calculate.I'm not claiming the real estate market is driven by a random process, btw.

[Samilly]

Nothing is going to replace Doctors and Nurses's. VA could make betetr use of its budget to hire more of both instead of trying to convince us everything is ok, its NOT! Instead of using best practices across the board each hospital is mostly left to them to run. If McDonalds can make a cheese burger taste the same through all around the world VA should. What you get and what it taste like is a real problem. Right now VA is TRYING WAY too hard to change its image without changing the Product, its not going to work.Start with the attitude of VA employees, they are there to Serve Veterans and to GIVE benefits the idea its free clinic needs to be drummed out and eradicated. Next let's address Fraud, I see TONS of people all the time trying to cheat on stuff like Travel Pay and other services. VA could save a TON on cracking down on even ATTEMPTING to defraud VA will mean a 6 month loss of ALL services, Second Attempt 1 Year, Third Attempt Ban for life. Any successful fraud would be a Ban for Life.What has VA done to Improve on the Ground Healthcare, these are the ONLY metric's that should be looked at. Your just throwing stuff up against the wall and seeing what sticks.Start by having the Claims Rep running each claim to call the Vet and tell them which way the claim is going, correct the problems before they come up, every time you mess something up it just causes 6 months to a year to correct something that should have only taken 3 min, IF SOMEONE WOULD CALL FIRST!Fire the current advisors, them telling you yes and the dumb programs coming out need to GO! The NASCAR jerk that spent a HALF MILLION on that needs to ride out on a POLE!Where is all the income for the research VA is paying for, companies are making HUGE bucks off what VA is paying for. We should get OWNERSHIP rights off of VA research dollars, put it into MORE RESEARCH!..VA needs to hire everyday Vet's not just the Privileged Few their voice should be equal to any 4 Star! Veteran's OverSite!Call me I can tell you what to do next