Top 10 Capabilities to Consider When Choosing a Data Quality Management Partner

Your business’ success depends on reliable, accurate, and actionable information. But that information is only as good as the quality of your data.

High-quality data allows you to have confidence in your decisions, mitigate risk, and consistently improve performance. On the other hand, poor-quality data impairs decision-making, incurs unnecessary expenses, and impacts regulatory compliance, all of which impact every corner of the business. 

Unfortunately, many organizations struggle with less-than-stellar data. In fact, studies show that only one-third of CEOs trust their company’s data and that 95 percent of businesses have seen negative impacts because of poor data quality.

To put that into financial terms, the impact of poor data quality costs the U.S. economy as much as $3.1 trillion per year.

Nearly 66 percent of CEOs doubt the reliability of their data and trillions of dollars are being needlessly wasted, so how can enterprises that want data to drive their success move forward?

Partnering with a trusted data quality management provider is the most efficient path to obtaining value from your data. The right partner can turn your business data into proven, profitable outcomes. 

The only catch is: You have to know how to select the best partner. As not every data quality management provider is high quality, accurate, and reliable.

10 Capabilities to Look for When Selecting a Data Quality Management Partner

Partnering with the wrong data quality management provider not only wastes time and money, but also damages confidence, incurs compliance penalties, and impacts user productivity.

To ensure you are working with a reputable, proficient data quality management provider, find someone with these 10 necessary capabilities: 

Capability 1: Predict and Prevent Business Disruptions

Problems with your data can manifest in ways that slow or even halt essential business processes. Your provider should have a platform that can: 

• Continuously monitor data objects for violations of business rules.
• Automatically initiate remediation workflows.
• Proactively address potential issues before process interruptions occur.

Capability 2: Accelerate Business Initiatives

It’s incredible how smoothly business initiatives flow when essential data is accurate and accessible. Your provider should be able to: 

• Consolidate business rules for data quality within a single glossary.
• Enforce business rules across all systems and employees.
• Visualize up-to-the-minute quality levels for focus improvement efforts.

Capability 3: Build Trust and Confidence in Your Data

When stakeholders have confidence in your data management processes, they trust that any necessary remediation will be fast and effective. Your provider should be able to: 

• Simplify and accelerate the remediation process.
• Ensure accurate remediations using team-based approvals.
• Alert data owners when quality falls below required levels.

Capability 4: Jump-Start Data Transformations

Digital transformation has shifted into overdrive, so it’s important to keep data ready for innovation at all times. Your provider should be able to: 

• Capture and reuse data knowledge to accelerate future initiatives.
• Mitigate risk by cleansing data in advance of data migration projects.

Capability 5: Tie Data Quality to Governance

You can’t have good quality data without good data governance. Your provider should be able to: 

• Derive data quality rules from institutional knowledge, technical needs of downstream systems and interfaces, and legal and regulatory requirements.
• Link the business’ semantic layer to data that is profiled and validated by the solution.

Capability 6: Connect People and Processes

Prevent poor quality data at the source with safeguards that stop bad data from entering the system. Your provider should be able to: 

• Alert business users to errors automatically.
• Identify out-of-bounds data.
• Guide business users in resolving data errors.

Capability 7: Expedite Data Analysis

Your data is only valuable if you can use it. Your provider should be able to: 

• Simplify and speed up data reconciliation and validation.
• Apply business context to data located across all data sources, including external companies.
• Access a library of pre-built reports, analytics, and remediation templates.

Capability 8: Holistically Address Data Quality Issues

Data quality improvements do not exist in a vacuum. Proactively addressing issues with data quality has an organization-wide impact. Your provider should be able to: 

• Reduce costly data errors and the staff time required for data quality.
• Improve data quality visibility and increase the rate of error resolution.
• Minimize disruptions, compliance issues, and customer dissatisfaction.

Capability 9: Intelligently Manage Data Quality

Interconnectivity is the key to streamlining data quality management initiatives. Your provider should be able to: 

• Connect business users with IT for smart data quality management.
• Optimize processes and increase data quality through user-configured reporting, automatic error tracking and routing, and role-based project execution management.

Capability 10: Facilitate Information Quality Management

Piecemeal data quality management won’t provide the results you need. Policies, processes, metrics, and monitoring ensure data quality stays on track. Your provider should be able to: 

• Establish a documented, repeatable process for identifying and resolving data quality issues.
• Empower business users to access and remediate data errors with powerful monitoring and resolution functionality.

Data drives businesses. Is your current data quality up to par? Partnering with a trusted data quality management provider can build confidence, reduce risk, save money, and meet your business objectives.   

Ready to learn more about Syniti as a data quality management partner? 

Schedule a demonstration with a member of our team.