I recently visited New York to attend the PRMIA Frontiers of Technology Forum to hear and discuss the main issues that are impacting the world of risk management. While I was travelling, the airline misplaced my luggage.

Reliable information, whether it’s related to finance, risk, marketing, sales – or to simply finding your lost luggage – is so important in today’s 24x7 business operations. It is increasingly difficult to find any business not impacted by the immediate need to “understand” a situation by drawing on the maximum amount of “data” or should we say “information” available.

But how should you use this information? All the speakers at the PRMIA forum highlighted the importance of keeping sight of the firm’s evolving business needs and processes and seeing shareholder value as the ultimate measurement when considering risk management programmes.

They also highlighted the need for reliable, robust and high-quality information to underlie the analytical processes on which decisions are being made…generally referred to as “knowing with confidence."

Two recent global enterprise risk management surveys by Deloitte and SAS have revealed that in the area of risk technology,enhancing data and data management processes remains a priority. During the PRMIA event, one banking speaker confirmed this, not only emphasizing the need for quality information and an understanding of data flow and transformation, but also the need to question whether the firm actually gains value from the information that’s being created and delivered.

If you can’t put the data to use, what good is it?

Clearly, it is critical that data quality and data management underlie business information processes – especially those related to a risk management platform.

So what has this to do with my lost bag? Well, my chosen carrier has processes in place to tag and track a bag. And when my bag is lost, the Lost Bag Help Line offers a nice person (somewhere on the planet) to explain this fact to me and a web page to view the latest tracking status, which in my case was “unknown”. In the end, when it came to the crunch, the tracking report was of no use because of lack of quality data and all the other complex systems simply could not cope with the resulting overload of requests for information. Again – if you can’t make use of the data, what good is it?

Just to rub salt into the wound I can’t even complain to the nice person, as the phone lines are constantly engaged due to the volume of lost bags… a combined case of Operational Risk and Reputation Risk me thinks?