It’s been an interesting week in the news for data hygiene. Jeff Veis, CMO at Actian published an engaging article about the impact of data on the customer experience. He gave examples of how ‘shoppers looking for cargo shorts on the web see that peers have bought a complimentary brand of sandals’, (hopefully the two won’t be worn with a pair of paisley socks!) He went on to stress that bad data creates bad experiences and that ‘data hygiene is essential to truly offer an advantage in today’s landscapes’. His article was timely, as not long after the Daily Mirror ran an article entitled ‘Covid models used to delay Freedom Day were ‘based on out-of-date data’’.
The take away is that our lives are now impacted by data on every level and the strength of that data and its effectiveness is imperative to its relevance. The Capgemini Research Institute has just released a new report: The data-powered enterprise: why organisations must strengthen their data mastery. In it they surveyed a thousand technology and business executives and interviewed a handful of executives in depth in order to ascertain the relationship between data mastery and the financial performance of organisations.
Interestingly enough only 39 per cent of organisations surveyed were able to turn data driven insights into a sustained competitor advantage and Capgemini concludes this might be because only 20 per cent of business executives trust their data often because it is of poor quality. However, those that do trust their data enjoy a significant performance advantage over their competition with 22 per cent higher profitability and 70 per cent higher revenue per employee.
It was these executives that Capgemini termed ‘Data Masters’. They are the executives who know how to use data to secure business outcomes. Capgemini stated that these executives are able to transform data and insights into actions because they have the necessary infrastructure, governance and operations.
However, the big reveal is that it is not just enough to have data. For an executive to become a Data Master they need to learn how to trust their data and use their data and being able to trust data is being able to know that it is as clean and up to date as possible and that’s exactly why we’ve launched Clean Contacts and the Free Data Health Check for Microsoft Dynamics 365. It enables executives to ensure that the customer data held within Dynamics 365 is as clean and up to date as possible. It’s then up to you to know how you use it to gain your performance advantage and become a Data Master.
