How important is data for businesses? Experian Data Quality‘s annual Global data management benchmark report shows that while data supports major business initiatives, businesses believe that 27% or more of the data they rely on may be untrustworthy. This can make it difficult for the 84% of organizations that say that data is an integral part of forming their business strategies to make well-informed, data-driven decisions. This leaves the majority of businesses making educated guesses or using intuition to make their decisions.

Businesses are starting to make strides toward solving this problem, but are often stymied by the infamous “Not Invented Here” syndrome that can cause their departments to not communicate well with other departments. The Accounts Receivable department may prefer Microsoft Excel, Accounts Payable prefers Intuit Quickbooks, and the IT department wants to implement a Blockchain-based ledger system to handle the accounting. Experian’s study shows that one of the chief difficulties involves building a better business case for an enterprise-wide data quality program. Essentially, how can the IT department convince senior executives that the Blockchain can make their lives a lot easier and benefit the business at the same time even when the entire accounting department might be arguing otherwise because they’re used to using their own systems? This becomes an issue when what’s needed is a unified data system that’s transparent, secure, and capable of delivering the data that each department needs without overwhelming them with the data that they don’t need.

When To Lose Legacy Management Systems

How do businesses manage the increasing reliance on “Big Data?” The real truth is that big data is unhelpful when 27% of that data may be inaccurate anyway. From a marketing perspective, that means the business could be blowing a huge chunk of its marketing budget by advertising to the wrong audience because the data is wrong. This is no small matter when 85% of businesses who say that they have improved their data management practices have noticed a significant improvement in communications with their customers and 73% of C-level executives indicate that inaccurate data is undermining their ability to provide an excellent customer experience. As Thomas Schutz, senior vice president and general manager for Experian Data Quality, put it:

“Good data is good for business. We know that when we help organizations make improvements to their data, they see positive results. However, organizations need to develop an understanding of their data assets and speak a common language around data so the necessary investment can be made in a holistic data management practice.”

Data management should be optimized as much as possible. 62% of organizations say the IT department has the greatest influence on how data is handled. IT departments often think of this in terms of Active Directory, database management, network security, and the ways that data applications interact with the end user but don’t always think about the context in which the data might have been created in the first place. It’s actually hard to blame IT personnel who are well-versed in fintech developments to prefer to offload some of the data processing requirements onto the Blockchain because then they can keep track of who, what and when with fewer worries about human error possibly being a factor and, if a mistake is made, they can more reliably point to where and when the mistake occurred. However, 70% of organizations say they would prefer to make data management the responsibility of the business as a whole with occasional help from IT.

That mean getting rid of departmental “silos” that may be sabotaging efforts to make data management a business-wide effort. Departments may prefer to hold on to their data for analytical purposes without sharing it with others who might need it to improve their view of the big picture, but this habit is a symptom of legacy data management practices that can sabotage cross-department collaboration. Maybe IT staffers who care about finding the right balance between accessibility, reliability and security aren’t wrong to want to implement a Blockchain-based approach to this because it can be presented in a transparent, yet tamper-proof, way across all departments with a few customizations of the end user interface to suit the needs of whoever might be using the application at any given time.

Data Systems on eBay

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