In the internet age, data is everywhere. Your location, purchase history, time of day, type of device, and so on are being captured every day now.
But why does anyone want this much detailed data anyway?
Without quality data, businesses will struggle to reach their goals. You must capture data critical to your mission correctly with solid processes and good tools in order for it to be useful. Good quality software, then, collects and leverages this data and does something with it.
Here, I’m sharing the amazing ways that data quality management can help businesses unlock huge value for the business and their customers.
Quality Data Enables Automation
Who wants to do remedial tasks that don’t challenge you to grow and develop new skills? From my experience, there are very few people who want to do this. If you have quality data, you can automate remedial tasks and free up employees’ days to work on higher-value opportunities. For example, if people are manually migrating specific types of files over from one system to another, you can automate this process with APIs.
Automating approval processes for items of low value is another great opportunity to consider. For example, invoices that are $25 or some other “low” relative dollar amount. The opportunity cost to reconcile an issue with that low-dollar invoice will probably cost more than just paying the invoice. So, auto-approving invoices below a certain threshold could help free up people’s time.
Quality Data Keeps People Safe
Safety is a big part of almost every industry, especially oil & gas, industrial, and pharmaceuticals. It’s critical to establish safeguards to protect employees, customers, and the community. For example, quality data can help an operator know they need to shut down an industrial plant if a device has failed or is trending to failure. However, if you don’t have quality data, you could either turn off the plant unnecessarily or miss an opportunity to do so because you didn’t know something was abnormal. Everyone wants to feel safe in their work environment. Good data quality management ensures that everyone has that feeling.
Quality Data Helps Leaders Stay Informed
Leaders are always looking for ways to be more informed. Whether they need to make a decision or not (more on that later) is not the point. Rather, giving them the information necessary to make informed decisions is super valuable to a successful organization.
In the digital age, there is a great opportunity to give leaders real-time updates on the progress of a project or an initiative. I’ve had experiences where the data was poor and out of date. I’d spend hours each month refining the data to ensure it was accurate and profitable for leadership. Data was entered poorly by the end users out in the field because they were not part of a culture that valued data. Poor data input was continuously causing rework for those who did value it. However, because I worked so hard to clean up the digitized data, leadership had visibility to the work done in the field. They had the information they needed to run their business well.
Quality Data Empowers Leaders to Make Better Decisions
When I was in the military, there was nothing better than knowing everything I could about the opposing force. If I could learn their position, number of personnel, capabilities, the terrain, and more, that would help me know what I should do if I were to encounter them. However, it would potentially go very poorly if my intel was not accurate, i.e., the data was poor quality. The same goes for running a business. The better you know precisely the ins and outs of your business, the better decisions you can make. This is a key reason why Amazon has become one of the largest companies in the history of the world.
Quality Data Leads to Better Customer Service
As mentioned in the article above about Amazon, having solid data quality management will allow you to better serve your customers. Knowing what products your customers prefer or how purchasing decisions change for each season will help you better understand your customers.
Better yet, what if you knew the best (wedding anniversary or birth of a child) and worst days (loss of a loved one) of the year for your clients? I know this may be more personal than most businesses can get to, but you get my point. The more you can “know” your customer, the better likelihood you can deliver more value. Therefore, you ensure they are not only a customer but also an advocate for your business for years to come.
Quality Data Allows for Better Prioritization
In the military, I heard the saying, “If everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority.” Prioritization is often key to the amount of success you can achieve in business. In most businesses, there are tons of opportunities, to-dos, maintenance, and projects that you can feel overwhelmed and not know what you should work on next. It’s critical to have good data to prioritize everything. Additionally, you and everyone else have limited time, resources, and capital to work with. That’s why ensuring important aspects of the business, whether it be equipment management, accounting, or project management, have high-quality data to help your business prioritize effectively. Without it, missed opportunities, ineffectiveness, and rework will rule the day. 
Ensuring Data Quality Management in Your Business Applications
At Soliant, our team doesn’t just build custom software solutions. We endeavor to help businesses achieve their goals through better technology and processes. Data quality management is a critical component of this. Our business analysts, consultants, and developers strive to deliver secure, accessible, and reliable data for our clients. Contact us to learn more about how we build custom applications that streamline the collection, cleaning, and sharing of business data for our clients and how we can help you.
