Making smarter, faster decisions using data is a worthy business objective hampered only by one thing: assurance in the quality of that data. For too long, business strategies and decision-making processes have been addressed by short-term solutions or trial-and-error fixes that cannot scale to support the kind of big data environment we live in today.
Retailers today, particularly those exercising a multi-channel strategy, must have an above average grasp on their data quality in order to rise to the challenge of meeting customer expectations. However, many still collect customer data from numerous sources, store that information in siloed warehouses, or work with third-party solution providers to manage that data.
Our research on global data management trends shows that 81 percent of retailers believe data management to be driven by multiple stakeholders in their organization, rather than by a single specialist. The problems, therefore, lie in having too many people with their hands in that data, or conversely, not having enough people who know what to do with that data. The variances in the way data is managed makes accessibility and usage—in an age where immediacy is king—more complicated than it should be.