Gary Allemann, MD at Master Data Management.

It is no secret that data is important for business. But do you know just how important it is – in terms of cold, hard cash, or how to maximise its value?

It is a known fact that big data is essential for business, assuming you can trust your data. It is the key to maintaining visibility into your business operations so that you can keep your organisation lean and mean. Quality data also helps you plan and measure the success of everything from marketing campaigns to new product releases. If your data is trustworthy, it is one of your most strategic assets.

Quality data: Quantifying its value

Have you ever wondered exactly how much data is actually worth? The exact answer is impossible to quantify definitively, of course. It will vary from one business to another but, clearly, big data is worth a lot of money for businesses.

Maximising return on your big data investment

If you read the figures closely, you’ll notice that many of the studies and statistics are not just about the money that can be made by implementing big data and data analytics in one way or another. Instead, they focus on the cash value that companies can gain by optimising the big data operations they already have in place.

What does that mean? Above all, it means ensuring your data meets the standards of quality and integrity. Today, it’s fairly easy to collect large amounts of data and run analytics on it. Data storage is cheaper and more convenient than ever, thanks to the cloud. Integrated data analytics platforms make it easy to get up and running quickly with basic data interpretation.

But if organisations base their big data and analytics solutions on low-quality data and pay no heed to its level of data integrity, they’ll see few returns on their investment. The value of the data you collect and analyse is only as good as the data itself.

Think about it. You can invest millions of dollars in a state-of-the-art data storage and analytics solution, but if the data you are storing and analysing is rife with inconsistencies, inaccuracies, or other problems, the analytics results you get will be misleading. They won’t help you to plan the right marketing strategy, predict your customers’ behaviours, or gain the other crucial insights that only quality data can deliver.

The takeaway is this: before you dive head-first into the big data world, make sure you factor data quality and integrity into the picture. That’s the difference between companies that simply do big data because it seems important, and those that do it in a way that yields high returns on their investment.