The Digital Cloud

In this series of posts we are looking at the challenges facing any organisation who wants to effectively manage their information. I am typically using the Oil industry as an example but I am sure that most of these challenges will exist in any organisation and most certainly does for the subject of this post.

Information Challange 2 - Data Quality

Data quality is a major issue in any industry. For instance last year a survey of C-level executives by the Economist Intelligence Unit showed that less than 1 in 10 managers believes they have the information they need to make critical business decisions and only 1 in 2 believe the information they do have is actually reliable. So a full half of the people surveyed don't believe the information they get is reliable. If you think about that it is quite an amazing statistic.

And what are the implications of such mistrust of data? Either you would not use the data at all, or you would be faced with the need to check through and assure the quality of your information. Various studies have shown that in a low data quality environment upward of 40% of resources are expended on data quality issues alone.

This of course will have a huge impact on productivity. Chevron for example has stated that a significant amount of time, between 30-70% is spent looking for and assessing the quality of the data found.

A continuing challenge?

The oil industry recognised this problem a long time ago and over the years many companies have started data quality initiatives to address the problem. But typically the result has been limited success and then only in specific domains and after a while the data tends to slowly deteriorates back to its previous state.

So to sum up data quality is one of the big challenges for information management and one for which new approaches are needed.