GRC Journal - (Page 54) EFFECTIVE INFORMATION GOVERNANCE: A KEY COMPONENT TO IMPROVING INFORMATION qUALITY By Lee A. DiTTmAr, Principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP, and Tim WALSh, Senior manager, Deloitte Consulting LLP It is highly unlikely that you would purchase a car without a speedometer. Nor would you board an airplane if you knew the instruments weren’t working. Yet we have seen organizations of all types operating without this kind of basic information on their speed, direction and other critical indicators. Many also don’t have insight into their operating and financial performance until long after they close the books, and even then they often have doubts about the accuracy and usefulness of this historic information. Most don’t have information about key performance metrics, including governance, risk, and compliance parameters, until after retrospective audits or other reviews. Despite historically heavy spending on their IT infrastructures, many companies still have difficulty gleaning accurate, timely and consistent answers from their corporate information systems. Many companies continue to be plagued with information integrity and data quality issues that stem from poorly governed information assets. Our bottom line: the accuracy, timeliness, reliability and transparency of information are not where they need to be. A 2005 survey Deloitte Consulting LLP conducted in collaboration with CFO Research Services illuminated the pervasiveness of poor information quality (IQ) in today’s enterprises. The survey report, entitled IQ Matters, found that a majority of respondents don’t have ready access to high-quality, reliable, useful information on operating and financial performance at their companies. Queried on 10 categories of IQ-combinations of the utility, timeliness and accuracy of financial and operating information, a majority of the senior financial respondents reported room for improvement in every category. The most common problem area, cited by more than 80 percent of respondents, was the utility of operating and financial information as a foundation for forward-looking planning and strategy. This ability to gain insight from experience − to learn what has and hasn’t worked well − is needed to drive more effective modeling, planning and forecasting. 16 Business Trends Quarterly Technology Solutions. Business Strategy.
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