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Technology: Gap Between IT and Business Makes Solving Data Problems Hard
Large enterprises ($500+ million companies) lose more than $5 million a year because of data problems, and one in five of those companies lose more than $20 million every year. That’s the result of a Forbes/SAP survey “Managing Information in the Enterprise: Perspectives for Business Leaders.”
The report validates some common sense expectations, like 85 percent of companies think that information is a strategic asset and 95 percent of companies think that information management is essential to business success. And on the flip side of that, 82 percent said that bad information can lead to costly mistakes and 61 percent said that bad information can adversely affect their business processes.
But how good is the data? The answer to this question proved interesting because the survey divided the respondents into two groups: IT and business groups like finance, sales and marketing. Across eight characteristics for “good data”, like data validity, data completeness, data accessibility, and data accuracy, in nearly every case the IT ranked their perception of data quality twice as high as the ranking provided by business (eg., 55 percent of IT ranked data consistency high while only 25 percent from the business side did.)
There’s also a split between IT and business about which groups in the organization are the ultimate “owners” of the data. 59 percent of IT managers said that data quality ownership resides with them, while 74 percent of line of business managers said that they had ownership. Further, when IT was asked if their company has any programs in place to rectify data quality problems, 51 percent said yes, while only 25 percent of business groups though there was a data quality program in place.
Business units thought that the biggest problem with data quality is inconsistent data (40%), while IT thought that duplicate data (38%) and data migration (38%) were the major problems.
Some of the problem for why there is such a gap in the thinking between IT and business about data is that only 45 percent of the organizations have an enterprise information management (RIM) program in place, and 31% are still trying to come up with one.
