Your company's data has the potential to add enormous value to every facet of the organization -- from marketing and new product development to strategy to financial management. Yet if your company is like most, it's not using its data to create strategic advantage. Data sits around unused -- or incorrect data fouls up operations and decision making.
In Data Driven, Thomas Redman, the "Data Doc," shows how to leverage and deploy data to sharpen your company's competitive edge and enhance its profitability. The author reveals:
· The special properties that make data such a powerful asset
· The hidden costs of flawed, outdated, or otherwise poor-quality data
· How to improve data quality for competitive advantage
· Strategies for exploiting your data to make better business decisions
· The many ways to bring data to market
· Ideas for dealing with political struggles over data and concerns about privacy rights
Your company's data is a key business asset, and you need to manage it aggressively and professionally. Whether you're a top executive, an aspiring leader, or a product-line manager, this eye-opening book provides the tools and thinking you need to do that.
*Starred Review* The self-appointed Data Doc, consultant Redman (and author of Data Quality: The Field Guide, 2000, plus two others) codifies his (and others) tremendous amount of wisdom about the value of data to business in ways nongeeks will readily grasp—and, one hopes, apply. Recognizing that the ultimate goal—to improve data quality and increase its corporate worth—demands a lot of change within American companies, he carefully positions the soft skills (that is, rewarding those who advance the cause) as critically as, say, the development of robust data and information management within the business. In fact, his entire book is laid out in the manner of a good change-leadership strategy: prove the business case (some costs of poor data quality, like today’s all-too-frightening subprime-mortgage meltdown); demonstrate its uses (like data mining and analytics); and detail the 12 barriers to implementation (for example, politics). Prefer to skim what might initially seem to be a “yawn” topic? Turn right away to the “Big Picture” at the end of each chapter, then go back to the beginning. Engaging, engrossing, and, yes, compelling. --Barbara Jacobs