• 21
• Data ,
• 24 Mar

Originally Posted January 2013

We are all guilty of hanging on to clutter, whether through sentiment or the thought “that it might come in useful”. With cupboards bulging with potentially “useful” items it becomes much harder to quickly locate that one thing critical to achieving our goal.

Recently, I was asked to repair a door lock. A simple DIY job, especially when you have all the tools to hand. Yes, I have all the tools BUT they were tucked away in “safe places” throughout the house. Eventually, after sometime, I had collated my toolbox, including throwing out some broken drill bits but all this added 2 extra hours to a 1 hour job. Inefficiency by a factor of three not to mention a number of other jobs that still remain on my to-do list.

How do you deal with your clutter?

• Organisation, allocating specific spaces to stow specific items often with the added benefit of labelling.
• Adding additional cupboards allows us to store more without the worry of throwing away something “valuable”. Makes working space look uncluttered, brilliant! But only serves to compound the problem!
• Getting rid of stuff that no longer has a useful purpose, we do not need, out of date or broken.  (When did you last do this!)

The same is true of Business Information. Data is our commercial asset, we bought it, we accumulated it through years of business and invested in storage – if we are wise, we even backed it up! However, the real commercial asset is not the quantity or how much we spend; it is the commercial effectiveness to our businesses.

Your Business Information could be a significant differentiator in today’s challenging economy. It requires constant attention to ensure that it remains a valuable commercial asset. It needs to be;

• Current
• Kept up to date
• High quality and consistent
• Focused and targeted
• Accessible in a timely manner to the people that need it
• Linked to insightful visualisations
• Kept lean
• Secure

How clean is your data?