Creating Value With Data Quality and GRC [A Simple Guide]

If you want to improve customer interactions, offer high-quality products or services, build loyalty, and generate more value, you need to understand the importance of data quality in your organization.

Data will allow you to make the right decisions and offer your clients the products and services they deserve. However, data could become a liability if the right systems to manage it are not in place.

In this article, you will learn how GRC helps you implement the best practices and governance to get the most out of your data and increase the value of your organization.

Let’s get started!

Table of Contents

1. Why collecting data can become a challenge?
2. Data Quality
3. Data Integrity
4. How GRC empowers organizations achieve high-quality data
5. Why do you need high-quality data, and how GRC helps you 
6. How GRC supports data-driven business and what are the key benefits of clean data
7. How GRC protects the value of your businesses and your data
8. What happens when your company’s data is not safe? Can it damage your company’s value?
9. How to use GRC to achieve high-quality data?

Why Collecting Data Can Become a Challenge?

Data is fundamental to your business success. Moreover, it’ll allow you to make the right decision at the right time and produce the high-quality, personalized products or services your customers want.

There is a challenge, though.

Businesses are gathering more data than ever, and new technologies keep accelerating this process dramatically. As a result, organizations have substantial volumes of data, making it difficult to manage, protect, and extract value from it.

Here is where Governance, Risk, and Compliance come in. GRC enables you to define and implement the best practices, procedures, and governance to ensure your data is clean, safe, and reliable.

Also, you can use GRC platforms like StandardFusion to create an organizational culture about security. The goal is to encourage everyone on your team to understand how their actions impact the business’s success.

Now, the question is:

Are you getting value from your data?

To answer that, first, you need to understand the following two concepts.

What is Data Quality

Data quality represents how trustworthy your information is and how it serves your organization’s specific needs — mainly supporting decision-making.

Some of these needs might be:

• Operations – Where and how can you be more efficient?
• Resource distribution – Do you have any excess? Where and why?
• Planning – How likely is this scenario to occur? Can you do something about it?
• Management – What strategies are working? What methods do you need to improve?

To ensure data quality, you can implement GRC strategies by establishing guidelines and regulations that standardize data usage across the company. These regulations may encompass labelling, movement, handling, and retention of data.

What is Data Integrity

Data integrity focuses on the reliability of the data both in terms of its physical and logical aspects. To ensure that data remains useable, it must be:

• Consistency
• Accuracy
• Validity
• Truthfulness

The goal of GRC is to maintain the integrity of your information by preventing unwanted changes during updates or modifications. Ultimately, the primary focus is on ensuring the accuracy, availability, and trustworthiness of the data.

How GRC Empowers Your Organization to Achieve High-quality Data

To leverage your data to generate value, you must ensure the information you gather is valuable and truthful. The following are the key characteristics of high-quality data:

• Completeness: The expected data to make decisions is present.
• Uniqueness: No duplicated data.
• Timeliness: The data is up-to-date and available when you need it.
• Validity: The information has the proper format and matches the requirements.
• Accuracy: The data describes the object correctly in a real-world context.
• Consistency: The data must be the same across multiple databases

A powerful way to make sure your company’s data holds these six characteristics is by leveraging the power of GRC.

Why?

Because GRC gives your organization the ability to establish guidelines, rules, and security measures to prevent mistakes, streamline tasks, and direct staff in handling important data.

GRC helps you answer the following questions:

• How are you ensuring that data is available for internal decisions and the clients?
• Is everyone taking the right steps to collect and process data?
• Have you removed redundancies?
• Is your organization prepared for unexpected events?
• Do you have a backup system?
• Are the critical processes standardized?

Overall, GRC aims to build shared attitudes and actions toward security within your company.

Why Do You Need High-quality Data, and How GRC Helps You 

Collecting data is only valuable if it is of high quality and reliability. Otherwise, it becomes a liability for your organization.

Modern companies recognize the importance of data as a crucial asset that affects their overall performance. Poor data quality can harm their credibility, decrease sales, and hinder growth.

In today’s business landscape, organizations must strive to become data-driven. However, achieving this goal is challenging without implementing an effective GRC program.

How so?

Effective governance, risk management, and compliance strategies are crucial for safeguarding and managing data quality. The proper way to do it is through the implementation of standardized, controlled, and replicable processes.

This is vital because every bit of data your organization processes has an associated risk.

When you understand these risks, you can implement the essential controls and policies for handling and extracting data correctly so that every department can access the same quality information.

If your organization doesn’t have structured data, you can’t deliver any value; even worse, you could face the following risks:

• Lost revenue: According to 2021 Gartner’s research, the average financial impact of poor data quality on organizations is $12.9 million annually.
• Reputational damage: Customers spend a lot of their time reading reviews before deciding. For instance, if you fail to satisfy your customers, everyone will know.
• Missed opportunities: You might lose leads because of incomplete or inaccurate data.
• Poor customer experience.
• Lack of compliance: In some industries, maintaining good-quality data can be the difference between compliance and fines of millions of dollars.
• Misanalysis: Around 84% of CEOs are concerned about the quality of data they are deciding on. Indeed, wrong data will lead to bad decisions and ultimately damage your business operations.

To sum up:

Having the right processes to manipulate data will prevent your company from missing business opportunities, damaging its reputation, and doing unnecessary repetitive tasks.

How GRC Supports Data-driven Businesses and What Are The Key Benefits of Clean Data

Data-driven businesses embrace data to get insights that can enhance the organization. Furthermore, the efficient management of big data through GRC software helps you recognize new business opportunities, strengthen customer experiences, increase sales, improve operations, and more.

For example, GRC can help your business by enabling you to create and manage the right policies to process and protect the company’s data.

More importantly, you can also manage individual policies to ensure they have been distributed and acknowledged accordingly.

Clean data offers numerous benefits, some easily noticeable, while others may not be so obvious. Placing trust in data not only enhances productivity and yields better outcomes, but it also contributes to fundamental and crucial elements that impact the success and performance of your business.

What are these factors?

Fundamental benefits:

• Profits/Revenue
• Trust
• Internal communication
• Employees’ confidence in sharing information
• Company’s reputation

Operational benefits:

• Customer satisfaction
• Better audience-targeting
• Efficiency
• Business outcome
• Privacy issues

How GRC Protects The Value of Your Businesses And Your Data

In today’s world, companies should be measured not only via existing financial measures but also by the quantity of monetizable data they can capture, consume, store and use. In particular, how data helps the organization’s internal operations to be faster and more agile.

When people think of high-quality data or big data, they usually associate these with big companies, especially technology and social media platforms. However, quality data gives organizations of any size ton of benefits.

Data quality helps your organizations to:

• Understand their clients
• Deliver better results
• Strengthen business culture
• Understand industry best practices
• Enhance business operations
• Identify the best partnership options
• Make more money

Using the proper GRC software helps you create and manage the policies and procedures to ensure your organization’s data is valid, consistent, accurate, and complete — allowing you to get all benefits previously mentioned.

The key to using GRC tools is that your business can produce what customers desire on a greater scale and with higher accuracy and velocity.

Now, what does this have to do with value?

By protecting the value of data, you are protecting your company’s overall worth. GRC empowers your company to create a value culture, giving everyone education and agency so they can make better decisions.

Also, GRC enables you to tell better security stories. These stories seek to build trust with your customers and partners, join new markets, and shorten sale cycles.

To summarize:

A better understanding of your operations — through data — will lead to better products and services, enhanced customer experiences, and ever-lasting relationships with clients and partners. All these symbolize growth and more revenue for companies.

Can Unprotected Data Damage Your Company’s Value?

Trust is a vital part of any interaction (business or personal) and, as such, is required for you to protect it — without trust, there is no business.

When data is not protected, the chances of breaches are higher, causing direct and indirect costs.

Direct costs are:

• Stolen information
• Lawsuits
• Fines
• Compensations
• Potential business loss

Indirect costs are:

• Reputation/Trust
• Lost revenue from downtime
• New and better protection
• PR activities

Often, reputation damages can generate long-term harm to your organization, making it hard for you to cultivate and maintain businesses. In reality, reputation loss is most companies’ greatest worry, followed by financial costs, system damage, and downtime.

So, what does all this mean?

It’s not just about you gathering data; it is also about how you can lower risks, leverage, and protect the data you already have. GRC integrates data security, helping your organization be better equipped against unauthorized access, corruption, or theft.

In addition, GRC tools can help you elevate data security by controlling policies, regulations, and predictable issues within your organization.

The bottom line?

When your company can’t get or keep customers because of a lack of trust, your organization’s value will be significantly lower — or even zero. Unfortunately, this is even more true for small and medium size companies.

How Can GRC Help You Achieve High-quality Data?

Many organizations have problems managing their data, which unfortunately leads to flawed decisions and a lack of trust from employees and customers.

Moreover, although companies understand how costly wrong information is, many are not working on ensuring quality data through the proper processes and controls. In fact, Harward Business Review said that 47% of newly created data records have at least one critical error.

Why is that?

Because there is a lack of focus on the right processes and techniques that need to be in place to ensure quality data.

What do poor processes cause?

• Human errors
• Unawareness of risks
• Incorrect data input or extraction
• Wrong data handling
• Inaccurate formatting
• Different sets of data for various departments

Fortunately, GRC’s primary goal is to help you develop and manage the right policies and procedures to ensure everyone in your organization appropriately handles data.

GRC aims to build a data structure based on the proper governance that will dictate how people organize and use your company’s information. As a result, Governance, Risk, and Compliance will empower you to get value from your data.

That is not everything.

GRC allows you to understand the risks associated with data handling, and it will guide managers in producing and distributing policies supporting any data-related activity.

The following are some of the ways GRC is used to achieve and maintain high-quality data.

Achieving and Maintaining High-Quality Data

• Data governance: Data governance is more than setting restrictions and telling people what to do. Instead, it is a collection of procedures, roles, policies, standards, and metrics that will lead to a cultural change to ensure effective information administration throughout the organization.
  
• Education: Achieving good data quality is not easy. It requires a deep understanding of data quality principles, processes, and technologies. GRC promotes the education process by allowing the organization to seamlessly implement, share, and communicate its policies and standards to every department.
  
• Everyone is involved: Everyone must understand the organization’s goal for data quality and the different processes and approaches that will be implemented. GRC focuses on cultural change.
  
• Be aware of threats: The mission of GRC is for the organization to recognize and deal with potential threats effectively. When companies are aware of risks, they can implement the necessary controls and rules to protect the data.
  
• One single source of truth: A single source of truth ensures everyone in the organization makes decisions based on the same consistent and accurate data. GRC can help by defining the governance over data usage and manipulation. Furthermore, GRC makes it easy to communicate policies, see who the policy creator is, and ensure employees are acting according to the standards.

Get a free consultation with StandardFusion to learn more about how GRC and data governance can protect your information and boost your organization’s value.