According to one recent study, the big data industry will be worth an estimated $77 billion by as soon as 2023. As businesses create more data on a daily basis than ever before, they’re increasingly looking for new and innovative ways to make sense of it all – which also explains why data analytics and business intelligence tools have become so popular over the last few years.
But at the same time, it’s also important to realize that these solutions aren’t necessarily as “intelligent” as you think they are – at least, not automatically. Poor quality data, for example, isn’t just a major problem for enterprises all over the country. It’s actually costing you a lot more than you think in a number of ways that are certainly worth a closer look.
A Ripple Effect in the Worst Possible Way
The reason why poor data quality ends up costing businesses so much money has less to do with the data itself and more about what that data represents in the grand scheme of things.
Business analytics tools, for example, are designed to allow organizational leaders to dive beneath all those ones and zeroes – to cut right to the core of the story hidden underneath.
But what happens if that data is of low quality? What happens if the story you uncover isn’t the reality of the situation like you thought it was?
You might be able to uncover fairly accurate information about asset utilization among your workforce, for example, but you’ll be completely cut off from the “WHY” of it all. You’ll know that your current workflows are inefficient, but you won’t have the information you need to do something about it. Or worse – you’ll THINK you have the insight you need, and you’ll suddenly be making big decisions based on an inaccurate picture that only ends up making things worse.
According to one recent study, for example, sales and marketing departments generally lose about 550 hours – and as much as $32,000 per sales representative – from using bad data. So not only is bad data causing your people to make the wrong decision at exactly the wrong moment, but it’s also taking up a tremendous amount of their time to do so. Every minute one of your employees spends wading through poor quality data is a minute that they’re not making money. That’s something that is ultimately holding your business back, not propelling it forward.
According to a recent Gartner study, about 40% of enterprise data is currently either inaccurate, incomplete or totally unavailable. This would be a problem in any situation, but in the modern era data-driven goals are a key part of the way that brands create competitive advantages in industries around the world.
To top it all off, bad data is also harming the ultimate return on investment you thought you were going to receive from those data analytics tools in the first place. You invested a significant sum of money into a solution that was supposed to allow you to work “smarter, not harder.” Not only is it NOT doing that, but it’s also making sure that every last dollar of that investment went to waste. You literally would have been better off if you’d taken all off that money and just funneled it into something else – but it absolutely doesn’t have to be that way.
Never forget that even the most powerful data analytics and business intelligence tool is ultimately only as good as you feed into it. If you feed it poor quality data, you’re going to get poor quality results. But if you make sure your data quality is where you need it to be at the beginning, there’s literally no limit to what you can accomplish.
Contact us today to discuss your company’s data quality!
