3 Key Considerations for Crafting a Winning Data Quality Business Case

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, the integrity and reliability of your data can make or break your business. High data quality is not just a nice to have; it’s fundamental for informed decision-making, effective data management, and maintaining a competitive edge.

Ensuring your data’s accuracy, consistency, and reliability can significantly enhance operational efficiency and drive strategic initiatives. You must have confidence in your data. However, making the case for investments in the right technology to improve data quality can be challenging. It requires a well-crafted business case that clearly demonstrates its value and expected return on investment.

Understanding Data Quality

Data quality encompasses several key attributes:

• Accuracy: How well data reflects real-world entities or events.
• Consistency: The uniformity of data across different systems.
• Completeness: The presence of all required data fields.
• Timeliness: The availability of up-to-date information.
• Validity: Adherence to specific formats and business rules.
• Uniqueness: Absence of duplicate entries.

High-quality data offers numerous benefits, including improved efficiency, better customer satisfaction, enhanced compliance and risk management, and more effective use of emerging technologies like Generative AI (GenAI).

Recognizing the Need for Strong Data Quality

In today’s data-driven world, recognizing the need for strong data quality is crucial for any business aiming to stay competitive and efficient. Prioritizing data quality should be at the top of your agenda.

Watch for these indicators of potential data quality problems:

• Discrepancies in data reports.
• Poor marketing email delivery rates.
• Declining business development efficacy.
• Missing fields in CRM systems.
• Increased customer or vendor complaints.
• Inventory management issues.
• Rising data storage and processing costs.
• Increasing email opt-outs.

Benefits of High-Quality Data

High-quality data can transform your business operations, making them more efficient and driven by reliable insights. For instance, Actian customers like Ceva Logistics and Ebix Health rely on high-quality data to ensure that every decision is based on accurate, up-to-date, and complete information, enabling better customer relations and streamlined operations.

3 Steps to Craft a Winning Data Quality Business Case

1. Assess Current Data Quality

Start by conducting a thorough data quality assessment. Use data profiling tools to examine and understand the content, structure, and relationships within your data. This step involves reviewing data at both column and row levels and identifying patterns, anomalies, and inconsistencies, which will provide valuable insights into the quality of your data. Data auditing should also be part of this process, assessing the accuracy and completeness of data against predefined rules or standards. This initial assessment will help you pinpoint the specific areas where your data quality needs improvement.

2. Align Data Quality with Business Objectives

Next, ensure that your data quality initiatives align with your business objectives. Identify the link between business processes, key performance indicators (KPIs), and data assets. Engage with data and analytics leaders to capture their expectations and understand what is considered the “best fit” for the organization. This alignment guarantees that the data quality improvements you plan directly contribute to your business’s overall success and strategic goals.

3. Track Progress and Measure Impact

Finally, it’s crucial to track the progress of your data quality initiatives and measure their impact. Develop an organization-wide shared definition of data quality, identify specific quality metrics, and ensure continuous measurement of these metrics. Implement a data quality dashboard that provides all stakeholders with a comprehensive snapshot of data quality, helping them see past trends and design future process improvements. Regularly communicate the results and improvements to stakeholders to maintain transparency and foster a culture of continuous improvement in data quality.

By following these steps, you’ll craft a winning business case for data quality that highlights the necessity for investment and aligns closely with your strategic business goals, ensuring sustained support and success. You’ll also build confidence in your data and decision making.

To learn more, download our new guide, 3 Considerations for Creating a Winning Data Quality Business Case, and start your journey to trusted data.

About Traci Curran

Traci Curran serves as Director of Product Marketing at Actian focused on the Actian Data Platform. With more than 20 years of experience in technology marketing, Traci has previously held senior marketing roles at CloudBolt Software, Racemi (acquired by DXC Corporation), as well as some of the world’s most innovative startups. Traci is passionate about helping customers understand how they can accelerate innovation and gain competitive advantage by leveraging digital transformation and cloud technologies.