The Trap of Inconsistent Data for Business Leaders

Importance of Data to Business Leaders

Business leaders need data from their sales and operations teams to present business strength and competitive edge against competitors. The type of business define how leaders address and position the current products line to make more sales and acquire new clients.

Business leaders tend to depend on data reported from working teams; they usually use the data without questioning integrity and freshness during business meetings and networking with current clients and prospect clients.

It is no brainer for the majority of successful business leaders and strong sales specialists to achieve high number of sales and client acquisition beside their ability to meet planned targets; they enjoy reporting achievements to top management and board members.

Failure of Data Management

While businesses invest time and money introducing new products and products variations, growing customer base, and delivering more services, the complexity of delivery and support grow. As the complexity grow between products, customers, and operational teams, they (businesses) dive into chaos of scattered information:

• Missing the need to organize proper data repositories
  
• Ignore collecting data for specific important operational steps
  
• Continue to use outdated information
  
• Ignore compliance on evolved regulations
  
• Neglecting the importance of data security
  
• And more …

However, the failure build up slowly and incidents happen suddenly, at unexpected time, with unexpected customers, sometimes one invoice could blow out an iceberg of inconsistence and conflicted data scattered around the organization. Once such iceberg tip discovered, management team start to uncover the amount of loses they were making in result of underlying teams ignorance of data cleanness, outdated information about clients, products without profiling, process flow deficiencies, and so on.

Business Information and Data Classification

• Business process information  

Meetings, Emails, white papers, product specifications, marketing collaterals, recorded phone calls, and more.

• Transactions information

Proposals, sales, deliveries, invoices, support tickets, claims, including all kinds of data collected during transactions execution in structured systems and well-structured documents.

• Data about Data (Metadata)

It is the technical way of structuring data in the organization, Metadata usually makes no-sense to business leaders, while it is crucial to safeguard and organize information inside the organization.

• Information Hierarchical Trees

Another technical way of representing information by focusing on specific angle, that collect and present information by relationship and relevance, a client focused information hierarchy is an example, product focused information hierarchy is another example.

• Information classification  

Data categories inside the organization and beyond the boundaries, which makes the baseline of information security and authority matrix of data storing, usage and exchange inside the organization and outside.

• Core information

Information describing the business flow, operations flow, and the focus of different management teams. It represent the strategy and major goals of the business; it is the baseline of decision-making and the major driver for products development, sales and marketing, services and support.

Master Data Management

Technology systems and usage of advanced technology for business execution is no more a luxury work. It is the core of business enablement, stabilization, continuity and grow.

The Master Data Management tools evaluated by Gartner and classified as a crucial step towards business success.

Solutions Review made comparison of Master Data Management system position changes between 2017 and 2018.

For business leaders, cost of ownership is major factor of decision making to acquire solid platform to drive the business stability. While the top in the list usually costs more, second player makes obvious choice to get the most with reasonable cost of ownership.

Profisee as a premier player on this niche makes great choice to businesses in terms of solution completion, and coverage to all business aspects starting from top strategy development to the lower level of micro-transaction.

Author: Jawad Alalawi

Information Security Specialist specialized in Financial Payment Services, Risk Management, Information Security, and Compliance. Experienced in solutions development and implementation, and technical writer/copywriter. Email (sjawada5 at gmail.com)

(53)