What is the impact of a poor data culture?

In this blog, I want to look at how a poor data culture can impact on staff in your organization. Most of the articles I write focus on what you need to do to implement data governance, but I had such a great response to my post on why the data governance business case is so hard to get approved, that I thought it was worth delving a little bit more into the topic of poor data culture. This could also be described as a lack of data literacy in your organisation.

All too often I come across organizations who have a very poor data culture. By that, I mean, that they don’t really think about data at all. I see this improving all the time but awareness levels are still low.

With some industries (those where they make, move and sell things) I can understand that perhaps the focus is on the thing that is being made, moved or sold and less about the data around these processes. However, for many service industries like financial services the products aren’t tangible. The products don’t exist in the real world, they are only data and yet many such organizations still suffer from a poor data culture.

It’s absolutely vital that we get everyone in our organizations, whatever sector we work in, to start thinking about data, and the impact that poor data is having on our organization. So in this blog I want to consider the impact a little more.

In my last blog, I advised you to look for your data quality issues. Maybe you found examples of where poor data quality has caused a loss. Identifying a measurable cost to your organisation is fantastic, but if you found examples of poor data culture how are you going to measure that? To be honest, it’s not something that often gets mentioned in a business case.

I can’t tell you how many times over the years I’ve had people tell me that part of their job is to fix and cleanse data. I can think of one instance in particular when a student actuary was spending two weeks every quarter, cleansing and fixing a spreadsheet before it could be loaded into one of their complicated actuarial models.

I was aghast that he was wasting eight weeks every year fixing data in a spreadsheet. This person had been doing the role for 18 months and had been told that this cleansing and fixing the data in the spreadsheet was part of the process that had to be followed! Actuaries are very intelligent and possess impressive analytical and statistical skills. Do you think it’s good value for them to be removing duplicates from spreadsheets or reformatting data in spreadsheets? I certainly don’t.

This is just one example but I think it’s fair to say that there are probably intelligent individuals doing monotonous routine tasks like this in most organizations What impact is this having? You have a company not able to fully benefit from these skills and added to that these individuals are going to get disenchanted with the role and be less productive or even worse may look to move to another organization.

Sadly I see this on so many occasions across all sectors and business areas.