Data has become every company’s most valuable asset, a reality that hit home during the pandemic. If an organization wasn’t already “digital-first,” the benefits of doing so quickly became clear. Customers, vendors, employees and suppliers expect a seamless, “Amazon-like” experience in nearly every interaction. As organizations continue to play catch-up on the digital front, however, recent market challenges and a slower growth outlook are adding more complexity to these efforts.
That’s why there is no better time than now to invest in your enterprise data. In these challenging times, there are two critical reasons for investing in your data—improving organizational efficiency and managing risk through enhanced data protection and compliance.
The key to any successful digital transformation is generating high-quality, trusted information—the kind that transforms your data into your most valuable asset. High-quality, trusted information about your customers, products, vendors and assets is the essential ingredient for successfully transforming operations and driving business value. Poor data quality, on the other hand, costs organizations an average of$12.9 million annually.
Treating data as a strategic asset eases this pain. Cloud-native master data management address this by collecting data from hundreds of internal and third-party sources and fueling operational systems with unified, real-time, high-quality data. With an API-first approach, high-quality trusted data can be made available to every business application, digital business process, automation pipeline, analytics and data science solution without replacing legacy systems, potentially saving money. With adaptable and smart processes, employee productivity can increase as there are typically fewer manual tasks. Decision quality and business speed increase because higher quality data is being fed into analytics systems, resulting in better and faster decisions. It also reduces the need for a manual review of recommendations before acting on them, reduces costs (digital self-service is cheaper than a call center) and increases the speed of M&A integration as connecting systems is easier with trusted data across them.
I’ve worked closely with many large organizations on modern MDM solutions and have seen how they have improved efficiency and reduced their IT spending. For example, an IT customer of ours saved $12 million over a five-year span by replacing a legacy MDM system with a modern MDM solution. A multinational life sciences customer saved over $3.6 million in infrastructure costs. The business impact or benefit of such data is a much larger return on investment across growth, efficiency and compliance functions.
With more organizations moving to the cloud, data security must be as good or better than on-premise-based systems—whether it resides on public, private or hybrid clouds. Data breaches continue to be a grim reality in today’s digital age. In fact, data breaches set a record in2021, rising a whopping 68% year over year.
Organizations also need to integrate support for growing and increasingly tighter global compliance regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
