Quality over quantity is powerful business strategy

Often in the world of data we come at the capability based on a 'lets get all the data, sort it out and then use it' approach. What this often results in is inflated and unrealistic expectations, bottlenecks to progress, rushed jobs resulting in poor quality and levels of complexity that are hard to manage.

Imagine flipping that model on its head to start with identifying the 3 most important business activities that data needs to support - lets say there is a reporting activity, a CRM activity and a process automation activity. Then the job to be done is to make the data that feeds these activities as high quality, timely and actionable as it can be for the deliverable. This is a process optimisation challenge and should take in the full end to end journey of the data considering everything from user input through integration, transformation and consumption. If the process is optimised against the business outcome it was intended to support it should need very little maintenance going forwards and should generate business value.

It's easy to see the issue and the opportunity but what's not so simple is to understand why the right thing for the business is often ignored and for me it comes down to a lack of ownership.

There are a multitude of roles who support the data journey such as data stewards, data engineers, data analysts, product owners, CDOs etc but it's rare to find an owner of the end to end data processes who focus all their effort on improving the quality of data specifically for the business purpose and are empowered to change the processes.

As businesses increasingly transition their data capabilities to the cloud there is a significant opportunity to build processes better and get things right first time. It's worth pausing and considering the RACI first though and making sure the people on it are empowered to act.