Why achieving effective data health is crucial for the future growth of your bus...

Thursday, 24 June 2021 12:44

Why achieving effective data health is crucial for the future growth of your business

Mark Fazackerley, Regional Vice President Australia and New Zealand at Talend

GUEST OPINION by Mark Fazackerley, Regional Vice President Australia and New Zealand at Talend:  Each year, Australian organisations generate, store, and manage more digital data than ever before. Now, in 2021, many are realising that the approach they’ve been taking is not delivering the types of benefits they require.

Initially, the focus was on capturing and storing data. Many businesses were told that they should collect as much data as possible and figure out how to use it later. That ‘later’ has now arrived and many are finding they are ill-equipped to move from being data-saturated to being data-driven.

When data is moved and stored without any other considerations, it essentially becomes a digital landfill of corporate information. Instead of solving problems, the data is actually making it harder to sort through the chaos.

This has led to a concerning situation. A large number of organisations, all of which rely on data to stay in business, haven’t addressed some of the most basic components of the data equation. They still don’t know what data they have, where it is, or who is using it. Also, critically, they have absolutely no way to measure its health.

Improving corporate data health

To really add value, data management needs to be an active and intentional system that increases an organisation’s understanding of its data and its potential to add value to operations. The solutions used to manage data should provide the knowledge that will help an organisation to be smarter, more agile, and more efficient while avoiding risk.

This can be achieved by following a strategy that’s been dubbed ‘data health’. This strategy involves the development of a holistic system of preventative measures, effective treatments, and a supportive culture to actively manage the well-being of corporate information.

The resulting system includes monitoring and reporting tools for helping an organisation understand and communicate, in a quantifiable way, the overall reliability, risk, and return of an asset that’s essential to their viability.

The goal is for data health solutions to help create a universal set of metrics to evaluate the health of corporate data and establish it as one of the essential indicators of the overall strength of a business.

This shifts away from treating data as simple, concrete units such as cells on a spreadsheet or fields in a database. Rather, data is seen as a complex, constantly changing organism. New inputs flow in and out, updated by users and transformed by shifting contexts. Those inputs and actions both provide an opportunity to learn about and change the value of the data itself. To truly understand what your data means, you need a more responsible, holistic view of that data.

There are essentially three areas on which an organisation needs to focus when undertaking a data health strategy:

• Preventative measures that pre-emptively identify and resolve data challenges
• Effective treatments that systematically improve data reliability and reduce risk
• A supportive culture that establishes an organisational discipline around data care and maintenance

Overseeing and orchestrating all of these focus areas is a comprehensive system of proactive monitoring and reporting to indicate success in achieving data well-being. The combination of technologies and cultural practices that form this system will be unique to every organisation, but, critically, the standards applied should be universal.

A data-driven future

Many organisations will eventually look back and wonder how they ever functioned without a quantifiable way to measure the reliability, risk and return of an asset so critical to their success. The risks of compromised data, and opportunities for innovation, are just too great to ignore.

No business should ever have to make decisions based on information they can’t find, see, or understand. The ultimate goal of achieving effective data health is not just to establish confidence, but total visibility into data, it’s lineage and usage, and to quantify its true value.

It’s important to understand how data is working in every aspect of a business, what value the data is delivering, and what return on investment is being achieved. Take time now to assess how data health can be achieved within your organisation. The returns this strategy deliverers in the longer term will make any efforts made now more than worthwhile.

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