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Integrity: As Important in Your Data as it is to Your Business Print E-mail
Written by James Appleby   
Thursday, 15 May 2008
Many companies have lost millions directly off the bottom line through lack of trust in their information assets, and billions has been wiped off their value as a result.  Severn Trent is to be fined £36million for misreporting its service data.  SocGen lost several billion Euros because of Rogue Trading.  Many banks have lost billions through the lack of transparency of their exposure to sub-prime markets.

A number of contributing factors need to be present for such losses.  Whilst (individual) intention to defraud is often one of them, the single most prevalent (and preventable) factor is poor quality management information.

Creating an environment with full transparency of information means the board is using information that is not “massaged,” but is a direct view on the operations of the business. When data integrity is there, fraud (or honest incompetence), is spotted soon enough to be contained. The board of an organisation is in a much better position to ensure the integrity of the business is maintained by the integrity of the information.

It is evident that the integrity of every organisation’s management information has become a business necessity. So why do so few organisations have it? Simply, whilst the concepts have been around for a long time, only recently has the technology to properly offer the scalability and transparency required, been available.

SAP has always led the way in this field, and three recent developments have put SAP a long way ahead of its competitors:

  • Firstly, the recent acquisition of Business Objects by SAP has added a world-leading data services product to SAP’s toolset. This allows the migration, transformation and cleansing of data from any enterprise system.
  • Secondly, SAP’s SOA architecture allows data quality, master data management, and process infrastructure services to seamlessly integrate front and back office reporting systems from any vendor
  • Thirdly, the release of BI-7 creates a scalable enterprise data warehouse solution. This understands business and business data properly.  
What could this mean to your business?  It means the board can have trust in the integrity of the data it is using to guide and control the organisation. And this means higher performance.
 

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