Trustworthy Data: The Goal of Data Quality and Governance
Is poor data governance and slow data prep really a problem? It is when it erodes confidence in the quality of your data.
It’s common today to say that analysts spend too much time preparing data and not enough analyzing it. Most recently, a new study from TMMData and the Digital Analytics Association finds that “nearly 40% of data professionals (37.5%) spend more than 20 hours per week accessing, blending, and preparing data rather than performing actual analysis.”
On the surface, this problem mostly concerns the valuable time of analysts — and their better-paid cousins, the data scientists — but data preparation challenges don’t exist in a vacuum. Data that’s difficult to access or integrate can lead to poor data quality, and untrustworthy data has serious implications for many industries.
The TMMData survey report put it baldly: “Data professionals lack confidence in data accuracy, which poses an existential threat to the industry.”
Whether it’s because of preparation problems, access issues, a lack of control, or other factors, trust in data is a widespread concern. According to the TMMData survey, almost half of respondents (48 percent) “question the accuracy” of the data they work with.
When the respondents were split between analysts and managers, 5 percent of leaders and managers believed their data quality was excellent, but only 3 percent of analysts and staff felt the same. Meanwhile, 11 percent of staff and 12 percent of managers reported their data quality was only fair or poor.
Other surveys have found leaders with even less trust in their data. According to Experian Data Quality‘s 2017 global data management benchmark report, on average, C-level executives believe that “33 percent of their organizations’ data is inaccurate.” Furthermore, “nearly half of organizations globally say that a lack of trust in their data contributes to increased risk of non-compliance and regulatory penalties (52%) and a downturn in customer loyalty (51%).”
It isn’t just a problem for data companies, of course. A survey from Bazaarvoice and Advertising Age on data use in digital marketing found that most marketers didn’t understand the sources of the data they received. Seventy-five percent of marketers weren’t fully confident that the data they were using was effective in reaching their target consumers.
The problem isn’t limited to large enterprises, either. Jennifer Moore is the senior director of marketing and marketing strategy at TMMData and an author of the whitepaper “State of Digital Analytics: The Persistent Challenge of Data Access & Governance.”
“When we embarked upon this study,” she told Upside, “we expected to see differences among organizations of varying sizes, but our findings revealed that data access and quality is a challenge for organizations regardless of size.
