To make informed decisions that would support your business, you first need to determine your goals, then break them down into achievable parts and attach them to relevant KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). These KPIs are then tied to data, which must be readily available and of reasonable quality.
Optimising processes’ costs and efforts can be achieved by eliminating process silos between business functions. Data also needs to be made readily available and securely shared between different stakeholders. This can be accomplished if you have some basic foundations in place across your organisation, such as a business glossary and a data catalogue, which allow for some initial data democratisation.
Remember that many data elements are shared across departments and business lines, especially Master & Reference Data, which are ‘viewed’ and consumed differently by each of those business lines. We acknowledge that having multiple systems within an organisation may be unavoidable, but starting with a common terminology and a centralised data catalogue is a good place to start.
Retaining customers and reputation can be maintained if you build and use advanced analytics to understand customers’ needs, groups, and categories. This can be achieved if you have data that is of appropriate quality and ready to be mined and analysed.
On the other hand, if you properly secure your assets, especially data, you can enhance your organisation’s impenetrability and protect and maintain its reputation. Just think about what would happen if there were security breaches and sensitive data leaked; the outfall of this event would be exacerbated if a company either failed to protect its data in the first place, or worse, were unaware of the breach. Besides a number of issues that could come with such a breach, the first thing that would come to mind is your company’s reputation.
Last but not least is compliance, which is an objective (or perhaps an enforced requirement) for multiple industries such as financial, sustainability, or healthcare, to name but a few. Data management and data reporting work hand in hand, with the latter depending on the former to ensure correct and risk-free reporting (risks such as regulatory fines).
How can we achieve this?
As a data consultant with experience across multiple industries, one major quality which is inevitable to consider is that in order to be successful in reporting, decision making, disclosure or compliance, some data housekeeping needs to take place in advance.