RETIRE SERVICES / ELIMINATE TECHNICAL DEBT
What is data hygiene and why is it important
Dirty data is an expensive problem. A survey of global businesses by Experian found that “Over three quarters (77%) say that inaccurate data hurt their ability to respond to market changes during the pandemic, while 39% say poor quality data has negative effects on customer experience.”
Experian estimates that dirty data can cost the average business 15%-25% of revenue: a $3 trillion loss to the US economy each year.
Bad data comes from a variety of sources. Human error and poor internal communication are the root causes of most dirty data, but these issues are compounded by the lack of a data strategy in many organizations.
Improving data hygiene can also be a time-consuming task when there are no data strategies in place. One estimate found that knowledge workers are spending up to 50% of their time manually finding and correcting inaccurate data. Therefore, instituting data hygiene best practices can not only improve financial outcomes but also reduce the amount of time and resources dedicated to correcting dirty data.
What is our aspiration?
Enterprise Systems will retire duplicative or underutilized services and eliminate technical debt that prohibits ES from making progress on strategic initiatives.
Why is this important?
In ES, our teams are responsible for the entire lifecycle of our applications. A replacement system is typically implemented before the legacy application is decommissioned, and the legacy’s retirement is overshadowed by the needs of the new system.
To support our current applications more effectively, we should take the time to retire the old application and infrastructure and transition the data as appropriate. Investment in the elimination of this technical debt will result in a more consistent and efficient support of our critical systems.
What are our concrete goals?
- Create a process to identify, eliminate, and prevent aging, duplicative, and/or unused applications.
- Retire redundant modules, code, and applications and discontinue code, processes, applications, and functionality that do not provide enterprise-scale value or ROI.
- Establish and follow best practices for data hygiene.
What specific targets are we setting for ourselves for 2023?
- Create a process to identify, eliminate, and prevent aging, duplicative, and/or unused applications.
- Establish a task force to create the criteria and process informed by internal and external process research and metrics.
- Document a list of target services that meet consideration criteria.
- Create an ES charter to be shared with stakeholders around this new process to provide visibility.
- Retire redundant modules, code, and applications and discontinue code, processes, applications, and functionality that do not provide enterprise-scale value or ROI.
- Standardize use of MS Teams for chat, instant messaging, and videoconferencing to minimize ES use of Slack, Skype, and Zoom to streamline communications.
- Shut down legacy infrastructure no longer needed or consistent with emerging standards as enterprise systems transition to the platform.
- Migrate Microsoft Identity Manager provisioning into Midpoint and retire FIM.
- Establish and follow best practices for data hygiene.
- Review and update university retention guidelines for diverse types of data, documents, and other stored resources.
- Establish an ongoing schedule to evaluate compliance with university retention guidelines and purge data accordingly.
- Review data cleanliness of Financials data to prepare for future ERP data conversion. Document lessons learned for other ERP areas.