How to prioritize your business units for data quality improvement projects ?

Regardless of business strategy or direction, organizations look to data to provide key insights and improve their ability to achieve their vision, key goals and objectives.

However, poor quality data can negatively impact time to insight and compromise the company's efforts in customer experience, product or service innovation, operational efficiency or risk and compliance management. If you're looking to derive insights from your data to make decisions, the quality of those insights depends on the quality of the data that feeds or drives them.?

Improving data quality means having a data quality management practice that is sustainably effective and responsive to the use of data, while evolving to keep up with or stay ahead of business and data changes.

To begin addressing specific business-driven data quality projects, you need to identify and prioritize data-driven business units. This will ensure that data improvement initiatives are aligned with business goals and priorities.

Not every business unit requires the same standard of data quality.

To prioritize data quality improvement projects for your business units, you must analyze the relative importance of the data they use to the business. The more important the data is to the business, the higher the priority to fix it. There are two measures for determining the importance of data: business value and business impact.

• Business Value of data

The business value of data can be assessed by thinking about how it relates to revenue generation for the organization, as well as how it is used for the organization's productivity and operations.

The business value of data is assessed by asking what would happen to the following parameters if the data is not usable (due to poor quality, for example):

1) Loss of Revenue

2) Loss of Productivity

3) Increased Operating Costs

• Business Impact of data

The impact of data on the business must consider the effects of bad data on internal and external stakeholders.

The business impact of data is assessed by asking what the impact would be of bad data on the following parameters:

1) Impact on Customers

2) Impact on Internal Staff

3) Impact on Business Partners

Data Priority Score = Value + Impact

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