The downstream impact of IT data improvements

How well prepared is your organization for growth? What are the challenges to making progress? One often overlooked constraint is the impact of IT data across an organization (in spite of the fact that nearly every decision made is based on data). Perhaps, given this, it is how you are thinking about your IT data? Could thinking differently about IT data provide the key needed to unlock a treasure of benefits for your organization?

IT systems and the data they contain for the organization is often seen as a foundational capability, an underpinning function, or simply a static resource separate from the organization’s core value chain. Instead of thinking of IT data as just “supportive,” perhaps you should consider it having its own value chain – a lifecycle of information that starts with raw data that is processed, refined and combined with other data; put into context; made available to users; and consumed in organizational decision making processes at both tactical and strategic levels. Framing data as a part of a value chain can enable you to see the downstream impact of upstream IT data improvements in the activities that consume them.

When the quality and reliability of IT data improves, leaders have more confidence in the decisions they make. They have the ability to evaluate opportunities and problems faster and more easily, without the need to question and independently validate the information they are continuously receiving. This increase in confidence can lead to the pursuit of more ambitious and more broadly scoped business opportunities, as well as the ability to preemptively mitigate organizational risks.

Data scientists, business analysts and managers rely on IT data as a critical input to drive business process optimization for their organization. Improving the quality of the data available from IT enables data professionals to see process-performance variances easier and faster, and to correlate previously independent data sets that can drive new operational insights. Self-service reporting and analytics tools that are gaining popularity with this community during the past few years are highly dependent on the quality of data from IT source systems to ensure reliability, accuracy and ease of use.

Data integration improvements across IT systems improve the efficiency of employees involved in executing transactional processes by reducing the need for redundant data entry tasks to keep operational data in sync as transactions flow through business processes. By removing manual tasks, managers and leaders have greater transparency into operational performance with a lower risk of intentional data manipulation and/or human error. Consistent data structures across IT systems have the potential of increased efficiencies by enabling the use of lower-cost reporting tools, minimizing the need for manual data reconciliation/scrubbing activities and accelerating the time to develop new data insights – leading to greater agility and business responsiveness.

In addition to moving faster, operating more efficiently and making better decisions, IT data improvements can expand the organization’s capacity to manage more data, which means more customers, more sales, more suppliers, more employees and more profits for shareholders. If these are benefits your organization is seeking, then perhaps it is time to make investments to improve your IT data.

Without the right tools, manually improving the quality of data just does not scale, as the types and volumes of data continue to increase at a staggering pace. Blazent has been a the forefront of managing “Big Data” scale implementations for some of the largest business  entities in the world, by providing an automated solution that delivers the highest data quality by using information gained from multiple sources to create refined data records.