Bad is good
Jinfo Blog

8th October 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Beleaguered information managers wondering what the future may hold for them could take some comfort from a little wave of recent studies highlighting deficiencies in corporate information and data management. Spanning information inaccuracies, resources tied up in redundant data and missed opportunities in social media, they each represent threats for some, opportunities for others. Bad data is costing United States business $700 billion a year according to a report from the technology analyst Ovum, Best Practices for Evaluating Data Quality Tools. Representing 30% of company revenues, the cost results from inefficiencies that lead to lost customers, sales and revenue. Incorrect and outdated values, missing data and inconsistent formats are among the flaws Ovum highlights. As well as increasing costs, it also results in poor targeting of resources and flawed pricing strategies (outline findings and contact details at http://digbig.com/5bcnyk). More waste is highlighted in findings from Informatica Corporation (http://www.informatica.com), a provider of enterprise data integration software. These show eight out of ten European IT professionals believing that their corporate networks are clogged up with unused data and applications, leading to huge inefficiencies costing more than €2 million a year in some cases. The vast majority of these professionals also said that their IT systems would run more efficiently if these unused applications were removed. Big problems occurred when delivering timely data or analysis to business users within their organisation – and over a third of those surveyed blamed user interference for the problems (reported in Information World Review – http://digbig.com/5bcnym – and widely throughout the IT press.) And lastly there’s the Social Media and Online PR Report 2010 from digital marketing specialists Bigmouthmedia and Econsultancy. Almost three quarters of the companies they surveyed said they were spending more on social media in 2010 than in the previous year, and expected that figure to go up again in 2011 – but an even higher percentage didn’t have a return on investment figure for most of the money they’d spent. Many companies also reported difficulties in integrating their social media activities with other parts of the business. ‘Clearly businesses need to take a long hard look at their existing corporate culture and think about how it can be evolved to incorporate the benefits of social media,’ said Bigmouthmedia’s Group Marketing Director David Hardy (http://digbig.com/5bcnyn). The Bigmouthmedia findings mesh well with those from NetProspex reported recently by Nancy Davis Kho (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e30827). Both studies reported marketing, human resources and public relations staff as key social media users (or potential users). All these surveys have their own axe to grind, whether simply selling the reports themselves or – more usually – touting solutions to the problems highlighted. Information managers may be able to profit from their findings too.

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