Health care is certainly front and center in today’s news. Without taking sides on the issues in Washington, I’d like to share some of the learning we’ve done at Pitney Bowes regarding health care – and how I think it relates to data and data quality.
Organizations – Pitney Bowes especially – define their employees as company assets; and they make major efforts to increase the value through productivity.
For example: Pitney Bowes makes a considerable investment in preventive healthcare for its employees, providing onsite monitoring and treatment for those with chronic conditions; and onsite care when employees are feeling under the weather. As a result, employees are better about getting the treatment they need: they start treatment sooner, and typically feel better sooner too. It’s a win-win: employees benefit; and productivity improves.
Every corporate decision and operation has reliance on the underlying data. In other words, good quality data is as much an asset to the organization as a hard-working employee. It’s time for businesses to recognize that data quality isn’t a place to cut corners. In fact, by taking a page out of the healthcare book and performing good preventive maintenance on data and quick treatment when data-quality issues arise – data quality will be better, and productivity will increase.
A few weeks ago, we talked about how data governance is everybody’s business. Just as employees stay healthier when it’s easier to do so, we can expect that employees will do a better job of keeping data quality high if they recognize the value and find that its easy to do so. I think one of the challenges is to make the process of data governance meaningful and straightforward.
0 Response to “The Rx for healthy data”