When considering IT investments during budget season, the initiatives that most often make it on the docket are software development, business partners, employee skill development and new hires. But as you work through these issues, how deliberate are you in forecasting around the true value driver of these initiatives: data quality? Data quality is no longer just a “nice to have”; it is a business imperative.
Without high-quality data, there can be no confidence that any efforts you undertake around analytics will yield reliable results. Lack of confidence can produce erosion of trust with your clients and partners, and ultimately undermine your service or product. If you build a great software application, but it uses bad data, it can have a significant derailing effect on all your upstream efforts and cause serious business problems and bottlenecks. To avoid this scenario, look beyond software development and focus on data quality. In this article, we outline several methods that can help you ensure the data you’re feeding into your software will serve as an asset, and not as a hindrance.
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