Is Your Organization in Data Denial?

By Joseph DeSiena - President, Consulting Services - Bardess Group Ltd. 

How Can You Achieve Data Quality?

The greatest battle you will face inside the organization is getting management to agree that data quality is a goal worth considering.

Everybody talks about data, but many often confuse it with information and knowledge. Basically, data is a core corporate asset that must be synthesized into information before it can serve as the basis for knowledge within the organization. Nevertheless, data is ubiquitous - it is used to support every aspect of the business, and is an integral component of every key business process. However, incorrect data cannot generate useful information, and knowledge built on invalid information can lead organizations into catastrophic situations. As such, the usefulness of the data is only as good as the data itself - and this is where many organizations run into trouble.

Many organizations neither recognize, nor accept the bad quality status of their data, and try instead to divert the attention to supposed faults within their respective systems or processes. To these organizations data denial has practically become an art form, where particularly daunting corporate barriers have been to avoid the call to embark on any "real" Data Quality improvement initiatives.

The best way to measure the extent of data denial in your organization is to ask the following key questions:

Depending on the answers to these questions, your organization may already be facing significant barriers to attaining Data Quality, each of which will need to be identified, assessed, prioritized, and corrected. According to William K. Pollock, President of the Westtown, PA-based services consulting firm, Strategies For Growth, "Most companies already know what data they do not have - and for them, this is a significant problem. However, the same companies are probably not aware that some of the data they do have may be faulty, incomplete or inaccurate - and if they use this faulty data to make important business decisions, that becomes an even bigger problem."

Part 2 Next - Common Problems with Corporate Data.

Gartner Magic Quadrant Report and Business Discovery 

By Philip Duplisey - Senior Manager, Consulting Services - Bardess Group Ltd.  

The latest Gartner Business Intelligence Magic Quadrant report was very exciting for all of us at Bardess. It confirmed the shift in the BI market we had been predicting for a while, the idea of end user driven Business intelligence and what Gartner calls "data discovery." As a boutique management consulting firm, we survive in the market against the large consulting firms by being agile, innovative and by solving business problems, not by selling software.

Gartner goes on to explain that, "The demand side of the BI platform market in 2010 was defined by an intensified struggle between business users' need for ease of use and flexibility on the one hand, and IT's need for standards and control on the other."

And, influential business users are now driving increasingly more BI purchasing decisions within organizations. They want, what Gartner describes as the "consumerization" of BI, tools that are easy to use and implement, fun and intuitive, and mobile.

In some ways we struggled to define what we do, and how the tools we use, add value to organizations, when they were compared against the mega-stack vendors like SAP Business Objects, Cognos or OBIEE.

With QlikView we told potential clients that we could deploy enterprise solutions in weeks or months, not years, we told them users love our dashboards, and that mobile deployment was an effortless by-product of our solution. We sometimes experienced raised eyebrows and incredulous smiles. How could they understand what we were saying when their experience with BI solutions was completely different?

QlikView outlines 6 capabilities that support business discovery *

• Insight for everyone. Instead of just a few people involved in insight creation, Business Discovery enables everyone to create insight. It's analogous to open source computing or peer creation. This is intelligence creation - rather than just information consumption. By bringing insight creation to the edges of the organization, Business Discovery mirrors real-world decision-making in a way that was never been done before.
• Zero-wait analysis. As the pace of business accelerates, the only acceptable lag is none at all. Business Discovery radically collapses time to insight with zero-wait, instantaneous results.
• Mobility. Business decision makers at all levels in an organization need data at their fingertips, wherever they are. They want to work how and where they like - whether that be in the warehouse, on the customer site, or on the trade show floor. Tablets and other large-form-factor mobile devices promise to make business data ubiquitous.
• An app-like model. No one needs the headache of deploying and managing monolithic business applications. Business Discovery platforms empower anyone to quickly develop and deploy simple, focused, and intuitive apps that can be easily reused.
• Remixability and reassembly. Nobody can predict what questions business users will have when they start exploring data - not even the users themselves. Business Discovery platforms make it easy for business users to remix and reassemble data in new views and create new visualizations for deeper understanding.
• A social and collaborative environment. Discoveries are one thing - sharing them is another. Often the real value of a discovery is unlocked when a minor breakthrough in one part of the company leads to a major one elsewhere. Business Discovery enables users to share and collaborate on insight and analysis.

If you would like a copy of the Gartner BI Magic Quadrant report, email your request to socialmedia@bardess.com. 

*BUSINESS DISCOVERY:THE NEXT GENERATION OF BI - A QlikView White Paper