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The amount of data is doubling every 12 to 18 months—but much of it is inaccurate, incomplete or otherwise flawed. And bad data costs organizations between 10 to 20 percent of revenue. But there are steps CIOs can take to fix the data problem.
Also See:
Tom Redman's Data Driven Blog
Join The CIOZone's Data Quality Discussion Group
By Ellen Pearlman
Strategic Thinker:
Thomas Redman
Credentials:
Redman, also known as "The Data Doc," is president of Navesink Consulting Group; the author of Data Quality: The Field Guide, Data Quality for the Information Age and Data Quality: Management and Technology; and a CIOZone blogger.
Big Idea:
Data and information merit special attention as unique, corporate assets and will need a chief data officer to manage them in the future
Book:
Data Driven: Profiting from Your Most Important Business Asset, published by Harvard Business Press, September 2008.
It is hard to read the news about the financial collapse of Wall Street without wanting to stand up and scream: "Didn't anyone see this coming?" Where was all the data that would have shown the regulators and the financial services chief executives the tremendous risks they were taking in their highly leveraged positions? Or was the data so bad or so intentionally biased that the financial companies kept getting the green light instead of a warning siren? Now that the federal government is taking over some of the financial institutions that got us into this mess, how do we know things will be any better in the future? If financial service firms didn't have the right data to accurately assess their risks and liabilities, what hope is there for the rest of us?
Thomas Redman, consultant and data expert, writes in his new book Data Driven that the sub-prime mortgage meltdown (which had not led to federal intervention at the time he wrote the book) "illustrates perfectly how bad or missing data contribute to issues of international importance and the costs and uncertainties that result."
While Redman says that no industry, organization, operation, line of work or collection of data is "immune to the ravages of bad data," there's probably no better time to recognize the huge costs of not trying to rectify this problem and work to come up with data management policies and programs that work. After all, data will continue to grow and businesses and institutions will continue to rely on it. Information and data are an organization's strategic assets and, in fact, the "only asset that is uniquely your own," says Redman.
Next: The Cost Of Bad Data
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