Mass data fragmentation: take control of ‘bad data’
Data has been heralded as the new oil, but what good would barrels of oil be if nobody knew how to use it? Or how to store it? Or even find it?
Data is undeniably one of the most valuable resources for organisations today. As a key business decision driver across industries, understanding data, and data analytics, in particular, is often crucial to success. Modern businesses are adopting technology to organise and comprehend the huge amounts of information they now collect. But when the data with which big decisions are being made is ‘bad’, or corrupt because suitable governance and cleaning techniques aren’t in place to guarantee the quality, what does that mean for data-driven businesses?
Recent findings from Experian highlight that customer experience ambitions are being challenged by this so-called ‘bad data’. Organisations suspect that almost a third of their data is inaccurate, and 70% said they don’t have the direct control they need to impact strategic objectives. Incorrect ownership (69%), lack of trust in data (49%) and information overload (65%) are the three most common factors preventing businesses from using data to their advantage.
In short, business decisions are being compromised by what they view as poor data quality. The question is, what is driving that deficiency in quality?
It’s important to note that a lack of trust in insights or ‘bad data’ aren’t necessarily a result of the data itself, but how it is being managed and collected. While these findings were certainly sobering, they were not necessarily surprising. Historically, businesses have been slow to tackle data quality issues, instead preferring to endure pains and fix issues reactively. In fact, the data phenomenon called mass data fragmentation has been coined to encapsulate the current driver of data quality issues, namely data fragmentation en-mass.
This refers to data that is either siloed, scattered or located in multiple copies all over an organisation’s IT system, leading to an incomplete single view of the data, its components, and an inability to extract real value from it. These data sets are typically located on secondary storage, used for backups, archives, object stores, file shares, test and development, and analytics. What’s more,this is the vast majority of business data – around 80%.
However, when fragmented – as is often the case – it can be extremely difficult to locate, manage or put to any use. So, it’s really no wonder that Experian’s research revealed so many organisations that suspect much of their data is inaccurate, ‘bad’ or difficult to control. They are probably not far wrong.
Research of 900 IT leaders by Cohesity showed that many business leaders view their secondary data as a very expensive storage bill, an unending management headache, a growing compliance risk and even a threat to morale in IT. Both sets of research demonstrate that a lack of control around data ownership will impact strategic ambitions, particularly around customer experience, but also agility, growth and competitiveness.
