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Businesses today continue to see data gaining in importance. As more and more organizations work to harness the power that their information can afford them, their underlying data is affecting every aspect of their operations. Departments like customer service, digital commerce, finance, compliance, operations, and more are all working to figure out how they can use data to better serve their customers, reduce risk, and become more efficient in their operations. 
As a result of these trends, an increasing number of businesses are looking to improve their data management practices. 

Data conversions are tricky undertakings. There is no way around that. They are time-consuming, expensive, and can feel downright overwhelming. For many agencies in the public sector, the constraints on budgets and resources are a challenge day in and day out. When it comes to data conversions or modernization projects, there is no exception. Across organizations in the United States, approximately 80% of data migrations fail. Why, you ask? Let’s take a closer look. 

In schoolyard terms, data migrations are the equivalent of the old “Telephone” game that you may have played as a kid. You get a line of people together, and the first person in the line whispers a sentence to the second person – “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs.” The second person then whispers this phrase to the next person, and so on, until they get to the end of the line. At that point, the last person says what the sentence is – in this case, “The slick clown’s socks slumped over the crazy bogs.” As you can see, the end result may be similar to the start, but it’s definitely not the same!

Bright and early on a Thursday morning, hundreds of data professionals convened for the 2017 Data Governance Financial Services (DGFS) conference. Hosted in Jersey City, New Jersey, DGFS brings together likeminded and passionate data professionals from across the country with a common mission: to share best practices and overcome challenges related to their data governance programs.

Have you ever met someone who made a great first impression, but the more you got to know them, the more flaws you noticed? Maybe they said one thing but did another. Or you expected them to show up at the designated place and time and they failed to show up. Or sometimes, they are just nothing like what you’d thought and you realized you made false assumptions. Well, sometimes your data can be the same way. At a first glance, it isn’t always immediately clear what issues may be lurking just past the surface within your data. That’s where data profiling comes in. 

This past week I was lucky enough to attend Strata Data Conference. The conference allows big data's most influential business decision makers and strategists to gather in order to share experiences, thoughts, strategies, and products with the goal of positively impacting their business or technology. The event was held at the Javits Center in New York City. Placing the conference in the heart of NYC allows companies from Wall Street and Silicon Alley to attend with relative ease, ensuring all industries are tapping into the opportunity that Strata presents.

Data is at the heart of every organization, and data migration projects are important undertakings for many businesses as they strive to keep up with the pace of technological advancement. Data migrations to more updated systems underpin the success of many strategic initiatives. While 35 percent of organizations have a data migration project planned for this year, a staggering 80 percent of all data migrations fail!

Despite the fact that the importance of data is widely recognized among company executives, there is a gap between this recognition and the number of organizations that are leveraging data to empower business decisions. To close this gap, organizations are investing in data management practices to establish trust and control of their data.

An effective data management strategy is good for your business. As organizations today rely on their data to help drive business initiatives, the quality of that information is growing increasingly important. But you probably already knew that. It turns out that data professionals spend a lot of time talking about data in terms of its accuracy and a lot less time talking about its accessibility and readiness. While the importance of accurate data is undeniable, organizations should understand that having accurate data is only a benefit if you can access that information when it’s needed.

I don’t think it’s a surprise to anyone that businesses are making their most important decisions off the back of the data available to them. Within the past year, we have conducted some market research about the role of the Chief Data Officer (CDO) and data management trends and the results indicate that organizations are truly considering their data an asset. One of the most prominent responsibilities of the CDO is transforming data into a business growth opportunity. We also have seen more and more data operations and analytics roles popping up in the market to address the issue of getting accurate and complete data back to management in a timely manner.