Bad data is bad for business: Invest in high quality data to gain a competitive edge
by Kerra McEwen
April 29th, 2014
On a recent trip to Vancouver, I met Jakki Geiger, Senior Director, MDM Solutions Marketing at Informatica. Jakki has 15 years of marketing experience and has had to deal with the pain of not having clean, consistent and connected customer and prospect information.
She knows all too well that as companies grow and expand, so do their data challenges. Data about customers, prospects, partners, products, suppliers and employees becomes fragmented. Valuable data is stored in different formats across various applications, making it impossible to make sense of the data or see the big picture. When companies don’t invest in the information management infrastructure they need, data becomes dirty, inconsistent and disconnected. Bad data prevents employees from achieving business goals such as growing revenue, cutting costs, better managing risk and submitting regulatory reports on time.
“Let’s face it,” Geiger says. “Bad data is bad for business.”
According to a recent McKinsey & Company survey of senior executives, Next-generation IT infrastructure, the highest priority objective for the IT organization in the next 1-3 years is generating more value from data.
So, how can IT leaders increase the value of their data? I spent some time with Jakki to gain further insight.
Kerra McEwen – First off, why do YOU think it’s such a great time to be in an information management role?
Jakki Geiger - In my 15 year career, I’ve never seen people in such a wide variety of roles, from marketing to risk management, recognize the importance of using information better and using better information.
Information management leaders can solve problems that are costing companies millions of dollars or preventing them from capitalizing on million dollar opportunities. Good information management leaders spend time with their line of business leaders and can quickly diagnose whether or not data is the root cause of a business problem.
KM - What impact can information management leaders have on customer-facing functions like marketing, sales and customer service?
JG - Let me share a personal example. Until recently, it was incredibly difficult for our marketing team to segment customers for tailored marketing offers. We just didn’t have easy access to clean, consistent and connected customer information. There was a huge gap between what we did know about our customers and what we should know about our customers. It was difficult to answer basic questions such as:
- Is this contact a customer or a prospect?
- Which products does this customer have?
- What is the next best offer?
- Is this a good time to make the offer?
Unfortunately, the data we needed to answer these questions was scattered across applications such as Eloqua, Salesforce, Seibel, and Peoplesoft. Our information management leader understood the root cause of this challenge. She brought our valuable customer, prospect, partner and product information together into a cohesive view in Salesforce using a combination of Data Integration, Data Quality and Master Data Management (MDM). Now our marketing, sales and customer service teams go to one application to get all the information they need to do their jobs. This Total Customer Relationship view includes:
- A trusted single view of companies and contacts for customer, prospect and partner.
- Sales-rep tailored company hierarchy views including parent companies and subsidiaries.
- All relevant organizational relationships.
- All open and closed orders and purchased products.
- All project statuses , including go-live date and partner involved.
- All open and closed customer support issues and escalations.
- All marketing activity including events attended and marketing assets downloaded.
KM - In your presentation ‘Unleash you Information Potential’ in Vancouver, you said you believed that using better information is the next frontier of innovation. Can you explain why?
JG - Ovum Research reported that bad data is costing businesses at least 30% of revenues. It slows people down. It saps productivity. It erodes trust and morale. You can have six sigma processes, world-class applications, and the most advanced predictive analytics, but if your data is bad, the rest doesn’t matter.
Competitive advantage comes from innovating faster than your competitor. You can’t innovate quickly when you’re highly skilled and highly paid people are spending the majority of their time searching for the information they need and then fixing it because it’s not accurate or up-to-date. My advice to business leaders is talk to your information management leaders. Find out what technology you can use to give your employees access to clean, consistent and connected information. Focus your employees on what you hired them for and help them innovate faster.
KM - You have said that many businesses revolve around managing assets. However, they are held back by an application-centric view. Asset information is scattered in multiple applications. How does that impact employees who rely on operational applications to take the best next action? How about those who rely on analytical applications to make the best decision?
Jakki - Assets are mission-critical in industries such as Oil & Gas, Utilities and Transportation industries, to name a few. You have to do a great job managing assets in these industries so you can pinpoint problems, fix them quickly, and report on them accurately. Often, there’s a huge gap between what employees know about assets and what they should know about assets because asset data is scattered across applications such as GIS, Finance, Vendors and Suppliers, and Maintenance Operations. Some companies recognize the value in shifting from an application-centric to an asset-centric view of their operations. They use a combination of Data Integration, Data Quality and Master Data Management (MDM) to manage and master their mission-critical asset information in a central location on an ongoing basis and share it with operational and analytical applications so they can take the next best action and make next best decision.
KM - How has MDM adoption has changed in the last 5 years?
JG - When I started working in the master data management market just over 4 years ago, our customers wanted to use clean, consistent and connected information to improve the accuracy of their reporting and decision-making. Now, the vast majority of our customers want to use clean, consistent and connected information to improve their key business operations as well. Leaders in marketing, sales, customer service, supply chain and procurement, for example, have never been more involved in the decision-making process for MDM technology. They recognize the huge cost bad data has on their operations. They want their teams to not only have world-class applications, but world class data so they can do their jobs better and innovate faster.
Groundswell’s partner Informatica enables organizations to maximize return on data to drive their top business imperatives. More than 70% of the Global 500 depend on Informatica to fully leverage their information assets residing on-premise, in the Cloud and across social networks.
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