Interesting New Gartner Survey

We read about a new Gartner survey in CIO that suggests that data quality problems are growing rapidly. The problem is becoming particularly acute since 85% of the businesses surveyed claimed that data was a strategic asset of the company.

Easy to use upstream data quality solutions, such as Ikhana's EDM Web Services, can greatly reduce junk data at a very low cost and can be installed in as little as one hour.

Cloud Computing for Data Quality

We liked this blog from Liliendahl: http://liliendahl.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/data-quality-from-the-cloud/

We think that using web-based, upstream data quality tools can provide users with a lower cost data quality solution that is easier to install. Those attributes should produce superior ROI and make it easier to get management approval and acceptance from IT.

ROI for Data Quality Initiatives, Part 2

In our last blog we discussed the financial analysis tools for building a business case to gain management approval for data quality projects. Employing the various financial analysis tools to support an investment in data quality is perhaps the easier part of the exercise. The common financial analysis tools are generally well understood and accepted by corporate managers. The harder part is marshalling the data that will need to be presented and analyzed. Nonetheless, there are methods for estimating the costs and benefits of data quality projects that will make a more compelling business case for a data quality project.

The costs of a data quality initiative present an easier estimation challenge. Quotes for the software and hardware that would be necessary for a data quality project are available from vendors. The organization cost (i.e., employee and management time) to implement the data quality initiative can be harder to estimate. However, there have been many data quality projects implemented and, therefore, there is data available or references that can be researched to make a reasonable estimate of this cost.

Estimating the dollar value of the benefits of data quality improvements will be the most difficult task. What is the dollar value of better quality data? The important thing to recognize is that the value need not be exact, but it does need to have a high level of certainty. The way to provide that certainty is to consider how bad quality data causes a business to operate at a suboptimal level and then use some analytical tools, such as sampling for example, to build a case for your estimate of the value of better data quality.

The following is a hypothetical example of how data quality benefits might be estimated for a data base being used for sales leads. Clearly, there is a cost to the company of giving its salesmen poor sales leads. If the sales staff is spending time on leads that will not result in a sale that is an opportunity cost of not making a sales call that could have resulted in a sale. To try to estimate this opportunity cost, a survey could be conducted on a sample of the sales staff that is large enough to be statistically significant. The objective of interviewing the salesmen will be to get an estimate of the amount of time they spend on bad sales leads. With the data from this survey an estimate can be made of how much total time the sales staff is spending on bad sales leads. The next step would be to determine how much time a sales person spends on a sales call and the success rate of a sales call. With this information an estimate of the lost revenue due to bad data quality could be made. This would be the benefit of a data quality initiative. While this analysis does not result in an exact estimate that has 100% certainty, it does create a reasonably compelling case that there will be a benefit to the company from the better data quality and management can have a reasonable level of confidence in the project assuming that the projected returns from the benefits sufficiently outweigh the costs.

Our blog does not allow for an in depth discussion of this important issue. If you have any questions, or would like to discuss this topic with us, please fill out our contact form and we will get back to you.

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