Do You Trust the Health of Your Data?

Today, companies can measure every aspect of business health, except the health of their data which drives business decisions. Data is vital to inform critical decisions such as identifying new routes to market, systems to support business agility, and more resilient supply chains. As Harvard Business Review puts it, “Your organization’s data is the source of both the opportunity and the challenges to your innovation. The difference is whether you can convert raw data sets into clear, actionable information.”  It is critical  for companies to get decisions right but, for most companies, there’s virtually no connection between the analytics systems running the business and the people and technologies designed to ensure the data powering those systems can be trusted.

In fact, having reliable data is crucial at all levels of decision making across any organization.

• For executive decision-makers who are operating under extreme internal and external pressures to make the right decision, clean and uncompromised data can dramatically improve the quality and accuracy of decision making across the organization.
• For business users who are inundated with dashboards and reports but struggle to understand what matters and what to trust, concise data provides a clear measure of data reliability, backed by a record of where that data originated and how it has been modified.
• For technical users who juggle countless requests to deliver timely, accurate, and digestible data, and need more insight into and control over the data that their internal partners are using, trusted data provides tangible proof of the accuracy and completeness of their work and frees them up to focus on complex analytics.

Improving the health of data used by a company should follow a core set of principles, which we refer to as: “the five Ts of trust.” Your data must be thorough, transparent, timely, traceable, and tested. The new Talend Trust Score, designed to help users dynamically rate data sets based on these criteria, could fundamentally change the way we use all available data and insights to make decisions.

To learn more about the health of company data, read this recent article published by Harvard Business Review.