dq:view - Steve Tuck on Data Quality

dq:View has moved...

Hi folks,

Thanks to everyone that has been following dq:View, but I've now taken the decision to move the blog to Datanomic's corporate site. I hope you'll continue to follow my witterings at http://www.datanomic.com/category/resources/blog/ or via an appropriate feed; RSS or Atom.

You can also find me online on LinkedIn as http://www.linkedin.com/in/SteveTuck, on Plaxo as http://stevetuck.myplaxo.com and if you're into Twitter, you can follow my Tweets at http://twitter.com/SteveTuck.

All the best,

Steve

p.s. There are already 2 new entries for you to read on data quality related topics at http://www.datanomic.com/category/resources/blog/.

Profiting from Your Most Important Business Asset

Tom Redman, a.k.a. the “Data Doc”, believes that information is an organisation’s most valuable asset, but almost all companies grossly underuse their data assets. From his work with hundreds of companies across many different industries, Tom's diagnosis is that the cost of poor data quality to a business is typically 20% of its revenues. Couldn’t your business benefit from a revenue uplift of one fifth right now?

With poor quality data costing organisations so much, it ought to be easy to build a business case for doing something about it, but projecting (and measuring) the return on investment (ROI) is something that many people struggle with. In my experience, data quality programmes nearly always realise sufficient tangible & quantifiable benefits to make their sponsorship a no-brainer.

My advice is to build a business case around the concrete benefits you can measure and demonstrate to your management. I’ve seen, for example, many customer data quality projects justified on the savings made by eradicating the printing and posting costs of sending mail to duplicated customers or undeliverable addresses. Sure, the improved customer service that results is also a benefit, but how do you measure its impact on the bottom line? Especially when there are other initiatives delivering improvements in the same area.

Building a business case with a clear ROI and continuing to measure the value of your data quality programme is critical. There’s nothing more certain to grab and maintain the interest of you executive. If it was ever acceptable to invest in data quality without achieving a measureable return, those days are surely now over.

Tom made this point in a recent webinar hosted by the IAIDQ; he went as far as saying that you should abandon a data quality initiative if you can't demonstrate a return on investment. "Hear, hear," say I. Tom’s new book, The Data Driven Company, promises to provide insight into new strategies for profiting from quality data (I’m expecting my copy any day), but I’m also keen to hear from you - send me your comments below.

Data quality carrots

When I want to teach my dog to do something, I generally find it helps to offer her something in return. A small piece of cheese, or other tasty morsel generally does the trick. It doesn't have to be anything big or expensive and, after a short while, when she's learnt what it is I want. she'll respond without the need for anything more than a "good girl" as a thank you.

I'd say the same is pretty much true for my kids (although they respond better to cash than cheese and can generally understand more complex requests). So why is it that some data governance regimes think that everything will be alright if they issue an edict and back it up only with strong-arm tactics - "do it this way, or else."

If you want to encourage the right behaviour from your front-line staff who collect and enter information that other knowledge workers consume, why not start by offering them some incentive to do it. If you only measure their performance by crude measures, such as call volumes, or numbers of records entered, you cannot expect them to worry too much about the quality of the data they're actually typing in.

By measuring the quality of the information they're entering, and rewarding them for doing it right, you'll increase the value of that information, remove costly scrap and re-work and improve the output of the downstream processes that use the data. Just like my dog, the reward doesn't have to be big or expensive and, after a short while, you'll find that the good behaviour becomes second nature, which can be positively reinforced by regular monitoring and a polite "thank you." There's a place for the stick, but it's better to lead with the carrot.

Please note, the author does not recommend the offering of either carrots or cheese as a reward for good data quality.