When starting out with data quality management, particularly if data quality technology is giving you a helping hand, it’s sometimes easy to become overwhelmed by the sheer volume of issues that your assessments and measurements produce.

Teams can quickly get bogged down trying to sift through the noise and extract a signal that they can present to management in the form of a “we need to focus on this” statement of intent.

The reason organisations often fall into this trap is that they find it difficult to interpret the severity of issues from the underlying data.

As a result, they may:

• Create too broad a focus - nothing gets achieved; the business waits too long to get a tangible return.

• Create too shallow a focus - something gets achieved, but the business doesn’t recoup enough value.

• Create focus in the wrong area - again, the advantage is lost as the improvements don’t hit the spot.

What can organisations do to turn this around?

The key is to step away from the data for a moment and identify the three types of process in your organisation that will be found in your area of the business, in varying amounts:

Strategic Core: These are strategic to your presence in the market and typically the “secret sauce” that differentiates you in the marketplace. For example, for Apple it could be your distinctive platform sales model, your research and innovation centres or your customer service centres in the shop network. These are the processes that people perceive “added value” within the face of competition.

Functional Core: These are processes that happen behind the scenes but are the core activities required to enter into a market. Examples include things like billing, procurement, recruitment and manufacturing assembly. The customer never sees these but they are still pivotal to your success and are the basic cost centres required for establishing a foothold in the market.

Non-Core: These are the more commodity-type services such as packaging goods, building maintenance, shipping products, etc. Consider these the things that are more easily outsourced and are not central to your brand.

What matters to your organisation right now?

Once you've got a clearer picture of what the current agenda is and how the processes in your part of the organisation align, you can start to ask some much more focused questions such as:

• Are you looking to compete more strategically, so service lead times and customer satisfaction become critical?
• Are you looking to reduce costs by outsourcing or streamlining the hand-off with other suppliers?
• Are you looking to improve your billing cycles so your accounts receivables turn a faster profit?

The biggest mistake companies make is to start by focusing on the data, not the process.

The concept of Strategic, Functional and Non-Core is relevant at every level of the organisation. So even if you’re starting out on a small departmental improvement, consider identifying the processes under your control, the data that belongs to them and whether any improvement will net a return that aligns to processes that are fueling change in your team, department or wider organisation.

What next?

Now you’ve identified a valid business process it’s time to once again focus on the data that relates to those Strategic, Functional or Non-Core activities and identify defects that directly map to those broader issues.

For example:

• Where could your shipping costs be reduced by reducing the “return-to-base” deliveries?
• How could your marketing and sales operations be enhanced with more timely or complete data (e.g. social media, email and company reference data)?
• What 20% of billing defect types cause 80% of the delays and costs?

By focusing on the processes that matter and the critical data that support those processes, you stand a far better chance of overcoming overwhelm at the start of the project and delivering real value to the business.