3 Dangerous Outcomes of Information Gaps

You’ve probably heard us talk about Information Gaps. Information Gaps occur when analytics break down in the cloud, due to implementation challenges, lack of data synchronization or an underdeveloped data culture at your organization. Sometimes information gaps are a result of no data in an organization, but most often enterprises have plenty of data: more than they can handle, in fact. The breakdown occurs when there’s an absence of a smooth data supply chain, where data technology, people and processes work together to keep data moving through an organization.

But what happens when there are Information Gaps?

The Three Dangers of Information Gaps

Information gaps can ruin decisions and careers. They cause automation failure and revenue-leaking inefficiencies. This lack of context and data together can have dire consequences for businesses trying to compete in digital economies.

No. 1 – Flying Blind

If data is simply not available for use in decision making and prioritization, opinions rush in to fill the void. So many opinions, in fact, that organizations often thrash about. Strategies are often determined by those who make the most noise or wield the most power. An organization powered by loudly voiced opinion in a fast-moving digital marketplace is doomed to failure.

No. 2 – Data without Context

This is perhaps the most tricky Information Gap of all. In this scenario, data can easily be molded into opinions masquerading as facts. When the discipline of transforming raw data into contextual information is performed incompletely, or the context comes from the inside of someone’s brain, raw data is spewed across the organization under the guise and backing of a formal analytics program. This creates an extremely dangerous scenario where inaccurate data can be bent to support the arguments of partisan perspectives without warning. This environment produces some of the world’s worst business blunders.

No. 3 – Unskilled and Untrained Self-Service

this onslaught of data has reduced the capacity for analytics in most organizations precisely when it is needed the most. Traditional analytics programs–and many data teams–run on highly specialized data handling skills in the hands of a few. They’re not equipped to handle the “Three D’s” of modern cloud analytics.

As data teams struggle under the burdens of running modern analytics programs, leading to longer delays and seemingly intractable team bandwidth issues, today’s digital savvy workforce is prone to bypassing the official analytics program altogether.

In this mode, digital-native workers simply download data directly from sources and try to stitch it together manually. The result is yet another form of data masquerading as information, an Information Gap. The charts get created and they seem conclusive. But deep underneath them lies a dataset which was not curated, cleansed and enriched by the skills of an experienced analytics professional. And worse, these datasets proliferate in silos, often propagating several half-baked versions of the truth.

How do you prevent Information Gaps?

Enterprises can help prevent Information Gaps from wreaking havoc on the business by ensuring that data teams across the business and data end users have access to the shared, secured, connected data in the cloud and the right tools and techniques to take advantage of it and generate real business value. Cloud-native data integration and transformation of data helps companies maintain that shared source of data and a healthy data supply chain to ensure that the right data comes together to unlock amazing insights into customers, operations, and future innovations.