by Angela Guess
Wayne Eckerson writes, “I just finished writing the first draft of my upcoming report titled, ‘Creating an Enterprise Data Strategy: Managing Data as a Corporate Asset.’ This is a broad topic these days, even broader than just business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing. It’s really about how organizations can better manage an enterprise asset–data–that most business people don’t value until it’s too late.”
Eckerson has organized several of his primary points into bullet points. The first is this: “Learn the Hard Way. Most business executives don’t perceive data as a vital corporate asset until they’ve been badly burned by poor quality data. It could be that their well-publicized merger didn’t deliver promised synergies due to a larger than anticipated overlap in customers or customer churn is increasing but they have no idea who is churning or why.”
His second point regards the value of data: “Certainly, there are cost savings from consolidating legacy reporting systems and independent data marts and spreadmarts. But the only way to really calculate the value of data is to understand the risks poor quality data poses to strategic projects, goals, partnerships, and decisions. Since risk is virtually invisible until something bad happens, this is why selling a data strategy is so hard to do.”
Read more of Eckerson’s points here.
photo credit: Flabber DeGasky
