Why Bad Data Quality Is Bad for Business

With big data only expected to get bigger, IT professionals and other organizational leaders admit that they lack complete confidence in their company's data quality management (DQM) practices, according to a recent survey from Blazent. The accompanying report, titled "The State of Enterprise Data Quality: 2016," reveals that that vast majority of survey respondents believe that their organization's perception of data quality is better than it actually is. Problems are created when employees manually input flawed data, or when issues emerge during the data migration/conversion process. Such problems translate directly to lost business value, in the form of additional costs, lost revenues, bad decision-making and/or delays in deploying new systems. "As foundational as data quality is to an organization's success, a majority of IT execs are not confident in their data quality management practices," said Charlie Piper, CEO at Blazent. "The pace of change and seemingly never ending increase in the amount of data and data sources are significant drivers of this lack of confidence. And, critical business decisions are made without a complete and accurate picture. These findings further validate how crucial it is for IT and the C-suite to continue to prioritize data quality, employing an organization-wide streamlined process for data management." An estimated 200 C-level execs, senior IT pros and key business decision-makers took part in the research.