Informatica recently published a new white paper entitled, “Recession-Proof The Business: Top Five Ways IT Organizations Can Help Companies Survive a Tough Economy.” The paper provides insights into five key areas that should be on every businesses to-do list in the current economic environment:

1. Manage Compliance
2. Mitigate Risk
3. Consolidate to grow
4. Know thy customer
5. Modernize the business

Rather than reiterate what is detailed in the white paper, I wanted to relay my thoughts on the role that data quality should play as we face the most challenging economic times in most of our lifetimes.

As I meet with customers, the key topic on most business and IT professional’s minds is “how can I do more with less?”  ‘Less’ for most organizations is typically in the form of reducing resources.  In these instances, I continue to discuss the role that a data quality initiative should play within the organization and can be a catalyst to meet the “doing more with less” directive.

Although there may be capital investment to procure the software and the services to implement the solution, the return on investment is typically realized in a short period of time.  The reason for this is initially uncovered when interviewing the key stakeholders who participate in the data quality initiative. I could share countless stories of the amount of time spent (and wasted) within an organization on manually building and supporting data feeds and reports, as well as the numerous issues that are typically found when analyzing the data.  In addition, the lack of a repeatable process can make even the smallest change to the data extremely time consuming to rectify. Thus, I continue to believe in taking the approach of not ‘boiling the ocean’. Instead an organization should find one project or data source to work with through an upfront assessment as one of the best ways to justify the value that a data quality strategy can bring to the organization.

Most importantly, by developing and implementing this type of strategy even amid the challenging economic climate, an organization is preparing itself to be well ahead of its competition once the economy turns around and additional funds for projects and personnel are available.  In the white paper numerous client examples are noted and reference the five key areas on the to-do list.  In each of these scenarios, the role of data quality was imperative and allowed the organizations to meet and in most cases exceed their initial objectives.

In keeping with the theme of the white paper, I have put together my own to-do list that should be considered for data quality:

1. Download the white paper!
2. Take an internal inventory of possible systems that could use data quality
3. Take an internal inventory of the key people and processes that would be impacted by a data quality initiative
4. Consider embarking on a Data Quality Assessment if you haven’t already
5. Consider setting up a half day data quality strategy session.  In these sessions, the intent would be to bring key stakeholders together from the business and IT to discuss key areas around data quality and data governance.  These sessions can be used to develop the roadmap and could incorporate items two through four as well.

Please let me know your thoughts or if I missed anything.