Recruiting data specialists is key for business

Businesses looking to improve data quality would do well to consider appointing data specialists to champion achievement in this area, according to Gartner.

Strategic business initiatives involving significant data integration, such as those related to business intelligence (BI) or customer relationship management (CRM), are being severely hampered by poor data quality, warns the analyst.

The issue is rife in Europe, with recent European Gartner BI research finding that more than 35 per cent of the 600 users surveyed cited data quality as a top-three BI problem facing their company in the next year to 18 months. Worryingly, data quality ranked as the second biggest challenge overall, according to the survey results.

In order to be successful when it comes to data stewardship, the analyst believes that hiring a specialist data professional - a so-called 'data steward' - should be complemented by clear quality improvement goals and an evolved business culture that regards data as a valuable, competitive asset as opposed to a necessary evil.

"Data quality is a business issue, not an IT matter, and it requires the business to take responsibility and drive improvements," said Ted Friedman, research vice president at Gartner.

"Successful and effective data stewards reside in the business, are visible, respected and influential - they must have the vision to understand the importance of data quality to the overall business objectives, as well as the impact of quality issues on downstream business processes... Many data stewardship programmes have resulted in little or no improvement because the organisation selected the wrong individuals as stewards or because those individuals were not organised and managed in a way that ensures success."

Once appointed, such stewards should be regarded as bastions of data quality, but in a trustee rather than an ownership capacity, according to Friedman.

He added that those placed nearest to the point of data capture and maintenance will become intimately knowledgeable about the data and expert in relation to its user in a business context, in addition to changing and influencing how their colleagues execute business processes.

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