Data Readiness and Quality: The Big New Challenges for all Companies

Founder and CEO of Italian start-up Digital Business Innovation srl, Antonio Grasso is regarded as one of the top Digital Transformation influencers on artificial intelligence, cyber security, digital transformation, the Internet of Things, and blockchain. With over 35 years experience handling numerous projects in the field of information technology for both enterprise and public sectors, Antonio is currently collaborating with Siemens, Intel, Atos, Cisco, Ericsson, IBM, Talend and The European Commission as Content Advisor, B2B Influencer and Software Innovator. Antonio’s aim is to help spread the concept of digital transformation, and he actively engages on social media to bring the latest content on new, emerging technologies and their uses to secure a better future.

We live in a digital age which is increasingly being driven by algorithms and data. All of us, whether at home or work, increasingly relate to one another via data. It’s a systemic restructuring of society, our economy and institutions the like of which we haven’t seen since the industrial revolution. In the business world we commonly refer to it as digital transformation. 

In this algorithmic world, data governance is becoming a major challenge. Data is fueling the entire transformative process which means good data quality is vital. Without it, we could find ourselves running into problems of process execution and bad customer service.

This chart illustrates this new landscape. Business relies on technology, processes and people. Data governance lies at the heart of these interactions. It is the cog in the wheel which makes everything else go round. If it has a problem, the entire system breaks down.

All of this is very easy to say, in theory, but what does it mean and how will we deal with it in practice?

The standard definition of data governance refers to the ability to manage every aspect of enterprise data including integrity, security, availability and usability. Data sources are everywhere, in many formats and many standards. We need to extract and elaborate insights that feed daily enterprise decisions.

I’m currently conducting research with Talend (NASDAQ: TLND), a global leader in data integration, to investigate how companies can harness the benefits of a comprehensive data governance strategy in an extended scenario where data drives business decisions. If those decisions are bad it means poor outcomes, higher costs and lower revenue.

During our collaboration, I discovered many aspects of the data governance framework that ambitious companies need to refer to and many real-life case studies of companies that rely on data governance as a strategic asset. As usual, I like to look at how data governance is being applied in the real world. So, let’s go through it industry by industry.