In any organisation where multiple systems exist it is inevitable that initially many discrepancies will be found and resolution of those issues will require prioritisation, but critically these issues can be assigned to the teams best placed to resolve the issue - often the very people who rely on the information so they are motivated to fix the problems promptly as they often are the direct beneficiaries.
This approach is a new way of working in many organisations - that enables teams to be custodians of their own data and systems, ownership and accountability belongs where it can best be executed and where the benefit is greatest.
Many management systems promote an approach of continuous improvement and this has been proven to be the most effective way to achieve confidence in processes, manufactured products, but can be applied to your data as well - it can be seen in the following diagram.
Start: Your information is spread across multiple systems, has duplicates, inconsistencies, missing data. Do you know the quality of your information?
Define: Define the systems and attributes that provide the information that contributes to your overall data landscape.
Import/Merge: Execute imports from those identified systems to robustly and reliably bring information into your digital workface.
Review/Validate: Review and report on the data that has been imported, look for inconsistencies between information sources, missing data and raise issues to track those problems to resolution.
Fix: Establish tasks to address the issues, inconsistencies and errors, assign those tasks to individuals in the appropriate teams and track them to completion.
Share/Collaborate: Once you have identified clean data, then why keep it to yourself? Share your digital workface with other teams in your company, and with other organisations and suppliers to share accurate and trusted data.
Trust: Making your data visible inside and between partners securely, with clear reporting on validity, consistency will deliver a step change in trust.
Critically the above process is continuous - and therefore the quality of data continuously improves, a significant return from a relatively small ongoing investment of time and of course no need to change tools, or maintain fragile integrations. Importantly there is no need to fix everything at once - since different issues will have different priorities and teams can focus on fixing what matters most first.
LivingTWIN provides a true SaaS solution to support continuous improvement without needing a large IT project, or any IT support. It is designed to be used by the teams and individuals who benefit from the improvement in the data.