Data Debt – What Is It and How Does It Impact Organizations?

Organizations with immature data governance strategies and expanding IT ecosystems often face increasing data debt. 

To create effective data management strategies business leaders must understand its causes and the solutions required to address it.

What is Data Debt?

Data debt is the build up of data-related problems over time including quality, categorization and security issues.

It is caused by a lack of reliable and repeatable data governance and management processes.

With data debt, prevention is better than relying on a cure. When data volumes grow faster than governance and management protocols can handle, everything from locating data, to classifying data becomes more difficult.  

This makes paying down the debt more difficult also and as the debt and data volumes grow, the organization has increasingly more work to do to manage it.

Automation solutions for moving and managing data help prevent issues with data from building.

Data debt can:

• affect an organization’s ability to operate efficiently.
• impede decision making, and prevent data getting to the people that need it.
• make identifying and protecting data subject to compliance regulations difficult.
• expose customer data and the organization’s reputation to risk, if sensitive data cannot be easily identified in order to protect it.

From reducing the amount of manual work, to increasing the accuracy and value of data and insight, tackling issues with data makes enterprises more efficient and profitable. 

Data Debt’s Financial Implications

The financial impact of data-related issues includes both the direct cost of poor data management and the indirect cost of missed opportunities. 

Cost of poor data management 

Poor data management practices lead to data debt that must be addressed quickly, to avoid paying “interest” on the debt. Until a company pays (fixes) its data-related issues, it will continue to pay hefty sums to maintain its data infrastructure, rather than executing value-adding tasks.

Poor data management practices create the following expenses:

• Increased storage and software licensing costs rising from data duplication or improper migration
• The labor and time costs dedicated to identifying and addressing bad data
• The reputational and financial costs of addressing non-compliance issues (including corrective measures and regulatory fines)

Cost of missed opportunities

Due to the time and resources required to tackle issues with data, organizations also incur the cost of opportunities missed because of, or while paying it down. It can degrade system performance, increasing the time it takes to run queries on a database, generate reports and more.

Problems with data can affect data availability, making all enterprise functions reliant on that data less efficient. 

Dealing with Data Debt

A lack of reliable and repeatable data management processes underpins many data-related problems. 

So introducing solutions such as automated integrations both helps to prevent and tackle it where it already exists.

Automated integration solutions ensure data is always moved in line with an organization’s expectations and requirements. This reduces the amount of retrospective work required to fix data issues.

ServiceNow Data Debt

ServiceNow generates a lot of insightful data. As such, it’s a common source for data debt.

Perspectium is a tried and tested integration-as-a-service that helps prevent and tackle problems with data that build up in ServiceNow over time. 

Delivered via a ServiceNow native application, Perspectium’s DataSync extracts massive amounts of ServiceNow data and replicates it to an external data store – without affecting ServiceNow’s performance. 

This gives an organization a more flexible and efficient means of storing and archiving data for compliance, analysis, or use elsewhere in the enterprise. 

Perspectium also provide a solution for managing ServiceNow data growth – Perspectium’s Record Estimator. 

Record Estimator helps you avoid issues by ensuring all tables within ServiceNow instances stay under the set limit. 

This nifty solution imparts visibility into the number of records in tables of an instance. It shows the growth of tables over time and notifies administrators each time the records reach the specified ceiling. 

As Perspectium solutions are native ServiceNow applications, organization’s employees will already be familiar with the interface.

Need help managing ServiceNow data? Talk to us.