Waiting for disaster to invest in data

Image credit: Arjuna Kodisinghe | Shutterstock.com

Have you seen OSS tools where the applications are brilliant but consigned to failure by bad data? I definitely have! I call it the data death spiral. It’s a well known fact in the industry that bad data can ruin an OSS. You know it. I know it. Everyone knows it.

But how many companies do you know that invest in data quality? I mean truly invest in it.

The status quo is not to invest in the data, but the disaster. That is the disaster caused by the data!

Being a data nerd, it boggles my brain to understand why that is. My only assumption to date is that we don’t adequately measure the cost of quality. Or more to the point, what the cost impact is resulting from bad data.

I recently attempted to model the cost of quality. My model focuses on the ripple-out impacts from poor PNI (Physical Network Inventory) quality data alone. Using conservative numbers, the cost of quality is in the millions for the first carrier I applied it to.

Why do you think operators wait for the disaster before investing in the data? What alternate techniques do you use to focus attention, and investment, on the data?

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