System Assessment

Where to begin?

 

Organizations are more and more concerned about the increasing data and information quality issues in their information systems. These issues have caused various organizational problems such as losing customers, missing opportunities and making incorrect decisions. Recognizing these issues, one of the crucial aspects for organizations to sustain business growth and competitive advantage is to be able to assess data and information quality. There are important aspects to investigate data and information quality assessment in your own information systems, that will affect your company’s initiatives to automate and upgrade your systems.

 

To begin it’s necessary to assess the quality of the three major information sources in information systems: data stored in your database, data extracted or mined from outside data sources, and the viability and usability of information products delivered to users. Previous findings of assessments conducted have shown that the poor quality of data found in example databases is correlated to the quality of information products perceived by users, and the communication errors in data received from outside sources. Lastly, in the end, you can have good quality data and still not have the right business intelligence to aggregate and process the information into decision maker views: dashboards and reports that tell you what to need to know to compete in the market and win.

 

Of course, the next largest consideration is getting your systems upgraded for a price you can afford, so you don’t automate yourself out of business! In this aspect, the cost of automating must be correlated to the savings the automation will give you, and having that cost pay you back in a realistic timeframe so as to bring more profit to the bottom line.

 

So ask yourself these questions to assess the possible problem points in your current information systems:

 

• Do the company have any processes still left on paper? (customer quotes or orders, accounting that still requires spreadsheets outside your systems, resource scheduling, or any information your resources need daily to service the customer, account statements are all good examples of things that should NOT be on paper).
• Does the company have disconnected systems, that don’t share data, that generates duplicate entry of company information? This is what we like to refer to as sneaker-net activity, where two systems are required to solve a problem, do a job, or answer a customer question.
• Do we have any applications that require constant support, either because they aren’t easy to use, or are old and obsolete, or are not supported by the original vendor?
• Do we have any recurring or constant customer requests that are taking up a lot of valuable time, that could be automated, like for instance on-line account access?
• Do we have any report preparation issues that cause delays (or pandemonium) due to the fact that they are needed by executives at specific times, but require manual intervention?
• Do we have any customer loss due to inability to service the customer due to loss or inaccuracy of our data?   

 

Your answers to these questions will point you to your current information system issues and help you organize the list of needs for upgrades and purchases.

 

Attune can help you with assessment, solution planning, and we can provide a plat form to pull all your systems together in a workable, sustainable architecture, that gives you the information you need to adapt to customer needs and business trends, and be able to compete in today’s market.