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Download our free White Paper: "Solving The Data Quality Problem!"

TriTuns Innovation Services

The Importance of Data Quality

Data is the life-blood of technology systems.  Data drives system functionality, management reporting and decision-making, and if used effectively, data is a major source of competitive advantage.  Data is also an Achilles' heal for organizations in that it is often the basis of legal, political, or public image problems.  Ensuring the highest quality data is a major challenge, and one that your organization cannot afford to overlook.

Data must be accurate, reliable, credible, complete, and timely to be valuable.  Individuals must trust the data is useful and relevant to the task at hand, before they will use it to improve decision making.  Poor quality data is of little use to an organization (garbage in = garbage out) and is a legitimate reason not to use a system.

The High Cost of Poor Data Quality

The staggering costs of data quality problems are often underestimated and ignored.  There are both direct and indirect costs resulting from poor data quality.

Direct Costs of Poor Data Quality:
Direct data quality costs are those that are easily quantifiable and measurable.  It is important to remember that these costs are incurred each time the data is used! Examples include:

• Financial costs resulting from delays in invoicing and receiving payments
• Hours wasted tracking down required information due to incomplete or inaccurate system data
• Publication, postage and handling costs for sending marketing materials to inappropriately targeted recipients or shipping to the wrong address
• The costs of litigation, lost business, or reputation damage due to release of inaccurate, inappropriate or confidential data

Indirect Costs of Poor Quality Data:
Indirect costs are those that negatively impact the organization but are not easily quantified.  Indirect costs include:

• Low user adoption of the system
• Unreliable management reporting
• Customer services and satisfaction problems
• The opportunity cost of time spent resolving issues caused by data quality problems

Your organization cannot afford the risks and costs of poor quality data.  Improving the quality of your data yields numerous benefits: reduces wasted time and resources, increases reliability and usability of the system, and improves reporting accuracy which enables better decision-making.  High quality data promotes healthy organizational growth while eliminating the risks posed by poor data quality.

Solving the Data Quality Problem

So why do so many organizations struggle to cultivate and maintain high quality data?  Often this is due to misconceptions about the nature of data quality problems, and the cause and solution to these problems. Misconceptions include:

• Treating data quality as a technical problem with a technical solution
• Embarking on a one-time data cleanup project without developing an approach for sustaining quality data going forward

At TriTuns Innovation we recognize that poor data quality is a behavioral problem, not a technology problem.  Individuals enter, use, review and update data and it is their behavior during these transactions that determines the quality of the data.  Thus, it is up to these individuals to ensure the data it is accurate and of the highest quality.

TriTuns Innovation helps clients develop a comprehensive program based on accountability for the prevention, detection, and correction of data problems.  We use our expertise to determine your unique needs and identify the structural elements, skills, processes, management practices, tools and reward systems that compose a successful data quality program.  We then guide you through the difficult task of implementing your data quality program.

Please contact TriTuns Innovation to learn more about how we can help you achieve higher quality data and realize all the benefits it provides.