Sales and market share have taken a downward trend every month in the last quarter. Your company’s profitability and cash flow are at risk. As the leader, you need to act. IT solutions are in place to provide insights, but you don’t trust the data. What are you going to do?

In today’s fast changing environment, you must quickly decide how to adjust to take advantage of changing market conditions. Analysis paralysis leads to failure.  Further, poor data quality leads to poor decisions. To improve your ability to make faster and better business decisions, companies require quick access to quality data.

You might think, “What an amazing grasp of the obvious!” However, our reality is we have disparate systems across, and even within business processes, yielding inconsistent or “dilapidated data.” This generates confusion not only on how to resolve the business issue, but even clarifying the root cause. How do we build the data quality enabling quick decision-making?

The road to the “promised land” starts with treating data as a corporate asset. Identify data owners who understand how the data is used, and provide them with a horizontal governance process and the authority to exercise it. Owners must manage their data, ensuring the standards, security, system of record, and consumers are documented and governed from cradle to grave. The data owners are your first line of defense to deliver data quality. They supply input to the portfolio process quantifying the impact of requested changes. This requires a horizontal approach spanning business processes to ensure end-to-end data integrity.

There is no silver bullet. This is heavy lifting. Leaders must treat data as a corporate asset to correctly respond to ever-changing business conditions and emerging opportunities. Data owners, dictionaries, security management, maintenance and distribution processes contribute to healthy data and faster business decisions. Act now to improve your data quality and decision-making speed.