Resilience Building Blocks: Data Quality & Availability

Data is everywhere, its quality and availability are key to an organisation's resilience and health. Our ability to adapt, change and prosper in a rapidly changing world relies heavily on having a cornerstone of available, current, and complete data at one's fingertips. In this article we delves into why access to data quality and availability are fundamental components on our resilience journey, and how successful organisations manage the tangle of data discrepancies and siloed data sources, ensuring clean, transparent, current, and complete data remains central to measuring their performance, analysis and ultimately efficiency levels.

As the lifeblood of every modern organisation, data provides the rock on which decision-making, strategic planning, and operational efficiencies are made. To remain resilient in the face of challenge, organisations need access to a rich seam of high-quality data. This provide up-to-date, and trustworthy comprehensive information, without which businesses risk making flawed critical decisions, ultimately opening the risk to costly errors which erode an ability to respond effectively or have intolerable client impact.

As a building block of resilience, accurate data fuels a clear understanding and transparent view of an organisations current situation.

Regardless of calculating financial health, validating supply chain security, tracking customer behaviours, prioritising risks, accurate data is the cornerstone to informed decision-making.

Data currency just as vital, adding another lens to quality as it allows the organisations to move swiftly, react appropriately and provide the greatest chance of success in rapidly changing circumstances.

Today, in our technical fuelled, on demand, just in time supply chain work disruptions are greater than ever. They often occur suddenly, having no regard for impact or preparedness in the unready.

The real-time or near-real-time data prepared organisation can be just the difference between swift action orientated problem-solving or playing confused, left behind catch-up.

Quality & timeliness are key assets in the organisations data journey, and its by adding completeness of the data that we are able to find assuring in this critical aspect of resilience.

Whilst incomplete data may lead to gaps in knowledge, experience and even understanding, it will certainly making it difficult to see the whole picture. If you are tracking your customer activities and services they access but have no data on their post-purchase support, it is probable you will miss this.

Comprehensive data ensures your organisation identifies both vulnerabilities and opportunities comprehensively, facilitating the development of robust strategies in resilience.

Never the less and despite the undeniable importance of data quality, currency and availability, organisations often struggle with challenges in these areas.

Data errors emerge when different parts of the organisation develop, collide, merge, collect, store, and manage data differently. The result is conflicting information, delivering a further question in how to trust any one single data source, let alone several.

Coming this with data siloes, where information is also isolated within specific functions or areas, and a multiplier starts to hinder sharing, integration and the trusted source.

Isolation multiplies discrepancies in data by its structure, preventing organisation's accessing that long sought for unified, holistic view of their business.

So what is the solution. To begin with businesses need to take an holistic and strategic approach to managing their data proactively.

Firstly, there is the need to establish good data governance frameworks which define the standards for their data quality, currency, ownership, completeness and security. Well articulated and embedded data governance policies ensure that everyone in the organisation understands their role in maintaining data quality and consistency.

Secondly, organisations need to invest in their data integration and interoperability abilities. Only by breaking down individual data silos and enabling systems to communicate easily, freely and effectively can businesses achieve a reliable single source of trust.

Finally, and just as important, embracing some advanced analytics and data validation tools will help to speed and automate data checks, quality and find any discrepancies early on. This will save time and enhances the reliability of swift data-driven decisions.

To summarise, data quality, currency and availability are connected as integral core components for healthy resilience in any organisation. Getting accurate, timely, and complete data provides a basis to make quality informed decisions and rapid responses to fast moving challenges. Data discrepancies and siloed data sources from historic sources will regularly hinder these efforts. Only by implementing robust data governance, integrating your data into a common currency, with robust validation measures, can our businesses ensure that our data is a reliable, resilient, relative asset to which we can pursue success in our ever-changing world.