Becoming the CIO – The Convergence of I.T. Strategy and Business Value Propositions

Data data data. The three word phrase that all CIOs and top I.T. senior executives should be concerned about. Data allows people to make informed decisions. Data allows people to create competitive advantage when complemented by a  well planned out strategy. Data, and its effective use and management allows the company to create value for the business.

In the age of the knowledge and information economy, knowledge workers and customers have the capacity to create large  amounts of data. Using the large amount of data that is privy to senior management can prove to be successful to top line growth if the right things are done. However, the old saying remains true:  garbage in, garbage out. With the current state of the economy and I.T. budgets being downsized to adapt to the  treacherous climate, every organization needs to have a good grasp of the data coming into the company,  the data that is created within the company, and the data that flows  out of the  company to form decisions and service clients.

Importance of good data management

1. Single unified view of the organization - Having a single, unified view of your organization and customers  is a tool that every executive should have at their fingertips. CIO magazine has a good article entitled, Demistifying Master Data Management. In it, the author cites a common pitfall that any large technology organization suffers: the inability and complexity of managing data over several systems and different customer segments.

2. Strategy and decision making – Dashboard Insight, in it’s article : Understanding the Importance of Data Management the author explains:  “By identifying how business processes and operations link to data, organizations can turn that data into information that can be used for decision making purposes.” The absence of good clean data which represents an accurate landscape of current events has the ability to hinder senior executives decisions on aligning I.T. initiatives with business strategy causing a negative impact to the bottom line.

3. Cost Management – The cost of poor data quality flowing through a process can be huge and devastating to any project or initiative undertaken.  The further along in the process the poor data  is discovered, the higher the cost to correct it. Although many people and organizations have different ways to measure poor quality data,  2 things  ring true:

1. The bigger the organization, the bigger consequences of having bad data.
2. There is a lost opportunity cost that firms endure as a result of inappropriately using company assets.

4. Business Services - These are reusable and core business processes that are used in many ways to interact and service customers. Having a set of good data that can be retrieved by these services can enable an organization to provide a smooth and consistent customer experience. For example, if  I have different ways of interacting with a company(online, phone, in-store, mobile phone), I would like the system to know everything about my previous purchases to better serve my current needs.  This isn’t possible if the data within the organization is not consolidated, cleansed, integrated and properly dispersed to the appropriate points of distribution.

As you can see, the importance of having clean data has significant impacts to the internal costs of the organization, plays a huge role in the decision making process, and inevitably drives its way to the customer experience. It is an end-to-end cycle that needs to be managed successfully for any enterprise to remain competitive and be successful.

Are you and your company taking data seriously? I sure  hope so.