Are You Using a Quicksand Foundation?

Aug 15, 2012 by Jim Harris in Data Quality

One of the most common objections to data quality initiatives is they often appear as if they will produce considerable costs without delivering any tangible business impacts and return on investment (ROI).

My recent video post The Five Stages of Data Quality sparked excellent commentary in the LinkedIn Group for the IAIDQ Information/Data Quality Professional Open Community, which included Andrew Dean remarking that when building the business justification for a data quality initiative, our organizations have an understandable “reluctance to spend money on something that may not have obvious or clear-cut financial benefits when we struggle to produce a sound financial case that will stand scrutiny.”

The lack of a clear-cut business benefit is the Quicksand Foundation that sinks many proposed data quality initiatives, leading many organizations to gamble on not investing in data quality.

Delivering business value with a data quality initiative requires knowing the data pain points causing business problems that need to be solved, so that you can sell the business benefits of data quality as an enterprise problem solver, but without sounding like Chicken Little by fear mongering with only the support of anecdotal evidence.

Are you using a Quicksand Foundation?

Are you trying to sell a data quality initiative without tying it to tangible business benefits?

If so, you are building a foundation based on quicksand. Don’t sink your data quality efforts before you even get started. High-quality data is essential to your enterprise’s continuing journey toward business success. Make sure that you start your journey with a solid foundation.

Tags: Data Quality