In Data We Mistrust. And it Costs.

It's time for that dreaded dashboard. The monthly one that gets sent along to someone up the chain, who then incorporates it into another dashboard, which then becomes another dashboard that the executive will make some form of decision from. But as usual, you're not sure about the data you're using, there's always something missing, or a number gets plugged into a formula wrong. Then there's those massive spreadsheets that have been around since, well, forever. This is happens across other parts of the company too. And you're a small business, just 150 or employees. You dread what it was like in that enterprise company you worked for.

Mistrust of data in any size of business is far more common than you might think. I've heard it in every single business I've worked with over the past several years. Executive/owners want an awesome dashboard for insights into the business from finance and operations to sales and marketing. Out of 30 businesses I've seen two with reasonably good dashboards. I've seen a few buy dashboard apps and try to plug them into their technology stack, only for them to fail.

Businesses today are collecting , storing and processing more data than ever before. You'd think too, that with so much of it coming from direct, automated sources, it would be easier to both trust and implement with a high reliability factor. Yet it isn't.

In large enterprise companies, entire teams are dedicated to data management, governance and analysis. Companies with data lakes, data scientists and so on. In most small to medium sized businesses, this task usually falls on finance and marketing, perhaps someone in IT, usually it's a subset of a primary role, often shared. It's costing you. Probably more than you realize.

If it takes one employee 8 hours a week to produce a routine dashboard from multiple data sources such as the CRM, sales CRM, website analytics and a couple of other sources you may have and they're hourly rate works out to $40/hr, over a year that equates to $15,040 a year (based on 47 actual working weeks. Add in a few other employees who build dashboards or report regularly and you can quickly move up to the triple digits in lost productivity. What can you do?

Get down in the data weeds. Right at the source. It's surprising how few organisations understand what data they collect, how they collect it and what exactly, they do with it. By getting down in those data weeds, mapping the data flows, looking at how the data is stored and managed, you can then start moving towards turning data into information, then knowledge from which you can make decisions.

It sounds simple. It is. And it isn't. For some businesses it doesn't take too long, but if your business brings in data from a large number of sources, it can take a little longer. Someone at the executive level should be involved in this as well. They should champion it.

It's also important not just for business management, but also for governance for privacy laws and cybersecurity. It is also important because your data is an asset. Value it as such and you'll find ways to trust it much better and faster.