I ended 2009 blogging with my 2010 predictions. Now that we’re in 2010, I’ll begin the new year with resolutions we can all make to move our organizations forward – to become information driven. My purpose is to provide quick anecdotes that are actionable so you can see immediate results.

1. Ask your IT applications manager to profile the customer data in two or three systems such as sales, marketing and your customer portal. Ask the IT person to quantify the quality of the information in each one. For example, how many duplicate contacts are there, how many customers are not ‘mailable’ or ‘emailable’, how many contacts are missing critical information for sales effectiveness. Once you have that information and know the quality of your data, you can accurately make the business case for what your bad data is costing you. This should result in helping secure the funding necessary to address these issues.
2. Ask the people on the front lines of your business about the quality of the information they work with every day.  Ask them how much time they spend on managing data – finding data, compensating for missing data, etc. Work with them to identify how much more productive their workdays could be with better data. Now that you have a sense of what bad data is costing you in terms of lost time and missed opportunities, you can quantify the problem in hard dollars.
3. Ask your IT department what business processes could be immediately changed to improve the quality of data in your organization. Profile the data in the process they identify, make the recommended changes and re-profile the data. Now, ask your team what process changes would immediately result in an improvement in data, follow the above steps.
4. Add a management objective regarding data quality for your team. A sample objective could be, improve customer data by 25%. Obviously, the person with this objective will need to baseline the information by profiling it, agree with you on what the quality issues are and then build a program to improve it. This will involve business process changes and collaboration with IT. Take it a step further and add data quality to your people’s job descriptions.  Behaviors will change immediately as performance metrics and compensation are impacted.
5. Start documenting common business terms and definitions used across your organization as a prelude to creating a common language of metadata that describes the critical information in your company.  This can be done with simple surveys – “Who’s a customer?” and “What is included in your revenue calculations?” – or anecdotally.  Ask your people to make a point of asking in internal meetings, “What do you mean when you say, ‘Transaction?’” and keep track of the results. This step is much harder than it sounds. You will find a fair amount of dissent with definitions. It may take several heated discussions to get agreement.
6. Schedule a meeting with your head of IT and invite the IT person who runs your key applications.  Let them know the company (or your part of it) wants help in establishing a data governance program that they will manage and help run with your support. This declaration will provoke a reaction if the program does not exist. It will prompt the IT team to research what data governance really is and they should be excited by the fact that you are interested in sponsoring it.
7. Ask your head of IT the following …and if you are in IT, ask the data architecture team to see the standards for enterprise-wide data integration. In most cases, standards will not exist. This leads to a healthy discussion as to why they don’t exist and what needs to happen to start them. Achievable objectives should be set to establish the standards and roll them out.
8. Initiate small, discrete projects for implementing enterprise information and data management solutions.  These projects – conceived and designed to work at the enterprise level but scaled to be achievable and demonstrate immediate business benefits – will build the foundation for additional projects.
9. Ask your CEO, “Are you getting the reports you need to do your job successfully? What about your direct reports?”  Anticipate that the answer is almost certainly; “No!” so be prepared to leverage this answer to sponsor data governance projects that will deliver immediate value to the C-suite.

I hope these anecdotes can help you jump-start your 2010.

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