The Benefits of Data Integrity: 3 Practical Examples

The Benefits of Data Integrity: 3 Practical Examples

Every department depends on reliable data to fulfill its organizational role and drive revenue.  Here’s why data integrity is crucial, specifically to marketing, IT operations, and compliance.

Marketing operations

Effective digital marketing is characterized by the ability to engage prospects with the right message at the right time. This is accomplished by leveraging marketing data, first-party data, and other information sources to target ideal customers.

But without data integrity, marketing operations and ad operations can’t trust that they’re getting an accurate view of the customer. They’re also unable to support or contribute the following to the organization effectively:

• Effective marketing taxonomies: Data integrity provides the foundation for taxonomies and metadata management. Both connect data-driven insights with digital content to influence and drive the customer journey.
• Sales support: Data integrity ensures sales reps can consider marketing qualified leads legitimate, worthy of their time and attention. Sales reps also depend on marketing taxonomies to streamline access to digital assets to support their sales cycles.
• Precise analytics: Remember when Coca-Cola tried to gain a competitive advantage by introducing New Coke in 1985? Who knows if precise analytics would have prevented one of the biggest marketing campaign flops in history? But modern brands wouldn’t launch a marketing campaign — let alone change a top-selling product — without accurate, comprehensive insights about their prospects and customers.
• Accurate marketing forecasts: Stakeholders won’t commit resources to expensive marketing campaigns without a reasonable degree of certainty that they will pay off. Data integrity ensures organizations can better predict campaign performance to justify the investment.
• Strong marketing ROI (MROI): Measuring marketing campaign performance allows businesses to identify and pursue activities that have a real impact, increasing their overall MROI.

With data integrity, organizations can leverage first-party data for precise analytics to fuel campaigns better aligned with audience demographics, behaviors, actions, and interests. Marketing data standards are the golden thread holding this all together.

IT Operations

In the past, individual business units controlled their data and implemented their own data management policies and processes. Thankfully, those days end as organizations embrace enterprise-wide data management and democratization strategies.

Of course, data integrity is essential to supporting a single, secure access point for accurate, trustworthy data. It also promotes countless operational efficiencies that boost productivity and streamline processes.

Here’s a sampling of how data integrity via data standards elevates the work of data science and analytics teams:

• Provides uniformity in how data is accessed and viewed
• Establishes key data elements and definitions that streamline sharing across the enterprise
• Safeguards against data loss, providing access to accurate, trustworthy backups
• Helps distinguish between unintentional errors and criminal activity
• Sets critical process parameters and controls
• Ensures data completeness by identifying gaps in information
• Provides consistent, accurate reporting that can be trusted
• Allows for precise analytics and business intelligence

Compliance

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) fuel data integrity trends across every industry worldwide.

However, achieving CCPA and GDPR compliance is just the tip of the iceberg for highly regulated industries where data integrity issues can physically harm the consumer or the environment.

For example, pharmaceutical companies must comply with FDA regulations related to quality assurance and good manufacturing processes (CGMPs). Poor records management or falsified data can lead to an FDA warning letter and hefty fines. These penalties are often compounded by stalled production during remediation, missed market opportunities, and reputation damage.

Many in the industry are learning that correcting data integrity issues is more costly than enacting policies and procedures that ensure integrity from the get-go.

Here are common issues FDA regulators routinely identify in laboratories that haven’t invested in data integrity measures:

• No password control or shared passwords on workstations and analytical software
• Unauthorized data access
• Poor documentation practices that compromise data reliability
• Evidence of data manipulation to pass quality control thresholds
• Backdated documentation
• Use of multiple sample runs to achieve desired results
• Lack of audit trail documenting changes

Bringing Data Integrity to Your Organization

Data isn’t just an IT issue. Your organizational data’s overall health and integrity enormously impact the entire enterprise — marketing performance, analytics, and compliance are just three examples.

Data integrity must be a mission-critical, enterprise-wide effort to avoid bad data’s costly, far-reaching consequences. Consider a data integrity solution to support that effort.