Untrusted, low-quality data is hurting decision-making in business

Organisations are overconfident when it comes to data-driven decision making

Digital transformation is part of the lexicon of modern business, and the quality and accessibility of data is key in ensuring the success of these moves. To learn more about how UK businesses are using data, and the impact of ‘bad data', Computing and Liaison Technologies surveyed IT decision makers in mid-large organisations, and presents the results in a new white paper.

About half of companies said that their ability to use data to make business decisions was ‘excellent' or ‘good', with 13 per cent giving it as ‘poor' and 0.6 per cent as ‘terrible'. A further 37 per cent said that their approach was merely ‘acceptable', implying that there is still a lot of work to do to bring data-driven decision making (DDDM) to the forefront.

The ability to present data is crucial in using it to drive decision-making. Respondents indicated, unsurprisingly, that this is much easier to do with structured data like spreadsheets than unstructured data like images and video. For example, 40 per cent gave their ability to use structured data as ‘good', compared to 24 per cent saying the same for unstructured.

Next we touched on data quality control, which businesses should be red-hot on following the GDPR coming into force in May. However, the results from our survey show that this isn't the case: fewer than half of respondents said that their internally-generated data was ‘good' or better.

Poor data hygiene can have a serious impact on DDDM; it slows down the availability of data for decision-making and can mean that analysts need to spend time cleaning the data when they finally get it.

Respondents exhibited even lower levels of trust in externally-generated data: only 33 per cent said that their trust in this data is ‘good' or ‘excellent', while the vast majority (59 per cent) called it ‘acceptable'.

If decision makers cannot trust their data, then DDDM becomes impossible.

Our results show that many businesses are over-confident when it comes to making decisions using data. They do not have access to the information that they need, it is in the wrong format, or they do not trust it.

Full results and analysis can be seen in our new whitepaper, ‘Is Bad Data Killing Digital?'