Poor Data Bringing You Down?

Why Ignoring Data Management is the Riskiest Course to Take

In the American independent film Margin Call (2011), which follows a 24 hour period at a large Wall Street investment bank during the tipping point of the financial crisis 2007-08, there’s one tension-filled scene in which a young risk analyst, played by Zachary Quinto, tells the bank’s CEO, played by Jeremy Irons, that from a risk management perspective, the figures being used by the bank’s traders to trade securities no longer made any sense. And not just because of where the market was at that moment. They didn’t make sense considering what had taken place two weeks ago.

Herein lies the problem with poor data quality – data that is inaccurate, inferior or untimely creates huge risk management challenges. All businesses are plagued, to some degree, by weak data, but the businesses which fail to address these data management issues face huge regulatory compliance difficulties and are disadvantaged in decision making. Making a strategic decision using flawed data, or data that is not trusted, means that those decisions are not based on facts and insight, but merely luck and instinct.

Perceived costs in money and time to address the underlying data issues hold some businesses back, but a strong data management framework does not need to be hugely costly nor time consuming. Many organisations already have some data governance policies and processes upon which a comprehensive framework could be built. Today, innovative and new software technology make it easy to distil disparate pools of information into one authoritative source.

Invest in your data management architecture, or face losing competitive advantage to businesses in your sector that have. ECI can help you build a data management framework that gives you confidence in your data.

Share This