Page 108 -

70 Enterprise Data Governance

erroneous financial reports or sending incorrect data flows to
partners. This is also the case when customers benefit from
incorrect discounts due to errors in the products and services
configurations customized through new sales channels, such
as the Internet.

For example, for several hours, one financial company
offered an abnormally low credit rate on its website following
a master data input error. An increase in subscriptions took
place, probably as a result of viral marketing, the net result
of which was detrimental to the company. Similar examples
are endless, as they occur daily in organizations.

A number of studies exist to alert companies to financial
losses induced by problems in lack of data quality, for
example The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) indicates
in its Data Quality and Bottom Line report that: “The Data
Warehousing Institute estimates that data quality problems
cost U.S. businesses more than $600 billion a year” [ECK
01].

Unfortunately, the financial valuation of this quality does
not often exist. It most often becomes part of a mountain of
hidden costs, the existence of which is not revealed in any
management control. Yet these costs do exist:

– what is the cost of the loss of new business potential
with a partner because they no longer have confidence in the
quality of information from the company? This business
partner, as it extends purchases to new types of products, no
longer accepts the order consolidation problems due to data
coding issues between products which are needlessly
heterogenous, such as order categories, payment types, type
of product returns management, etc. As the company
extends its sales strategy to services, these data coding
discrepancies are amplified because the underlying IT