Data Driven

CHAPTER TWO

The (Often Hidden) Costs of Poor Data and Information

I find that most good managers today are well aware that their organizations suffer from bad data, but they don’t know enough to properly slot data quality on their To Do lists. They may still view data quality as an arcane technical issue, albeit an annoying one—certainly not something that can land their companies in any real trouble. They don’t yet see bad data lurking just beneath the surface as the root cause of or as an important contributor to their organization’s most important challenges. Similarly, the accounting system doesn’t have a category entitled “costs/risks due to bad data,” so managers have no window into the cumulative impact of the problems that they do see. ...