Is a Hidden Data Factory Costing Your Company Money?
A recent study by Harvard Business Review (HBR) estimated poor data quality costs the US business market $3.1 trillion dollars per year. Yikes.
HBR calls this massive waste of money as the “hidden data factory,” which represents the lengthy and expensive process of manually checking over poor data and making corrections to that data.
Think of it like hiring an incompetent employee. Not only will a bad employee not get any significant work done (and ultimately provide zero value to your business), they will also take valuable time out of your own day to fix their mistakes or provide additional training over and over again. All in all, it’s a huge waste of time and resources (that costs time and resources to fix)!
If you apply this analogy to poor data quality, it works nearly the same. Businesses who use poor data to make decisions will not garner the results they require to be successful, and will require copious amounts of time and resources to fix to achieve the required results.
At Trapp, we view these wasted efforts and dollars as “shadow IT costs” or “Excel Hell.” It’s the hidden costs of dealing with incorrect data, poorly constructed data architecture, and ineffective reporting capabilities at a company.
Bad data in, bad data out. Bad decisions in, bad decisions out. If you’re feeling the effects of this, you’re not alone, we can help.
First steps are:
- Assess data architecture and reporting platforms
- Develop roadmap to centrally store data across business
- Train out bad employee habits
- Train in data automation / rules to follow
- Help manage transition and future business intelligence platform / needs
The challenge is real for small business because the expertise/budget sometimes doesn’t align to fix the problem. Luckily, Trapp Technology makes it affordable for those businesses, and the savings in shadow IT will offset part of those costs.