

Next, build the case for how data quality will help each department. Detail each way the business stands to benefit from better data - and the risks involved in continuing to operate according to the status quo. To do this, build a business case for data quality.

You need stakeholders on board to get the resources you need and ensure cooperation. Get buy-in from all departmentsįirst, you’ll be more successful in your efforts to manage data quality if you have buy-in from all stakeholders within the company. These steps require effort, but once you have systems and processes in place, you’ll be able to assure data quality more efficiently. To be sure that the data you’re working with is high-quality, there are several steps to take. Low-quality data is not valuable and can even be dangerous to an organization. If data doesn’t match each of these components, it is compromised. In many cases, you’ll want data to be real-time, but in others, a wider window is fine. Exactly how up-to-date your data must be will vary based on your purpose. If your data is outdated, you’ll be working from a faulty foundation.

Up-to-date - You can’t stress the importance of fresh data. If data is clean, it follows proper syntax (formatted correctly) for usage, and it is unique across all systems (there aren’t multiple, different versions of the data in various locations). Irrelevant data can lead you astray.Ĭlean - Clean data is both valid and unique. The importance of this component becomes clear when you consider the correlation/causality conundrum: data may be correlated and seem relevant but actually, be unrelated. For example, if you’re trying to determine why last quarter’s marketing spend didn’t deliver the results you expected, but you’re looking only at attribution reports, you may miss the significance of a black swan event on the industry you were targeting that quarter. Perfectly-good data in one situation may be completely irrelevant in another, making it unactionable. Data must be related to the question you’re seeking to answer to be considered high-quality. Relevant - This is where the definition of data quality gets murky.
#Sigma client profiles full
The old parable of the blind man and the elephant is apropos here - if all you can see is the tail of an issue that is, in fact, a full elephant, you’re going to misjudge the nature of that issue. If information is incomplete, on the other hand, you’re missing one or more pieces of the picture, giving you a fragmentary view. Without accurate data, you may be targeting accounts that aren’t ideal prospects - wasting a portion of your quarterly budget and missing your targets.Ĭomplete - If your data is complete, then you can be sure you have all the essential information to take effective action. If you’re managing an ABM campaign and you’re targeting companies that fit a specific ideal client profile, you must have an accurate list of companies and people in those companies that meet the profile. The importance of accuracy is obvious, but let’s look at an example to see just how significant it is. Let’s examine each of the characteristics to look for as you define data quality in specific situations.Īccurate - Accuracy refers to how factual or correct the data is. To further complicate things, data that may be considered high-quality in one situation won’t meet the standards in another. What defines data quality exactly? Data quality is complex, with several components. In this article, we’ll look at what you need to be thinking about when it comes to data quality and how your organization can manage data quality. You have confidence that you’re seeing all the important factors relevant to decisions. You know which data is vetted and identified as relevant. With a strategic data governance process, you can quickly see which data is inaccurate, out-of-date, or out-of-context. Many challenges are contributing to the problem, including disparate data sources, ineffective cleaning processes, and inefficient validation.īut you can address these barriers.

Managing data quality is essential for a healthy business.Īs important as data quality is, Gartner found that the average cost of poor data quality on businesses amounts to anywhere between $9.7 million and $14.2 million annually. And production will be blinded to bottlenecks and other issues until it’s too late to fix problems without major delays. Without reliable data, marketing campaigns will miss the mark, resulting in wasted ad spend. While there are many reasons data quality is invaluable to an organization, accurate insights are one of the most significant. You need to know what the reality of a situation is, on the ground, in real time. Smart decisions require reliable information.
