Building greater confidence in your underlying data is easier said than done. The typical organization is home to a wide variety of fragmented data sources. Most users rarely have consistent access to these disconnected silos. Even if they do, the data may not be in a format that makes it easy to digest or use for further analysis. Improving confidence in the data is crucial not only to the success of your BI and performance management investments, but to overall organizational success.

Improving confidence, however, isn’t a direct process. It takes three separate factors:

• Understanding. Users do not understand what that data means and where it came from in their reports and analysis.
  
• Trust. As they look at numbers, users are not confident that they are correct, and that quality can be sustained over time. They lack “information trust”-- the ability to establish a baseline for the quality of information and employ data integration capabilities such as profiling, cleansing and de-duplication.
  
• Relevance. Users need unencumbered access. They need to be able to quickly gather all the relevant information. Key enabling technologies include ETL, federation, change data capture and data warehousing.
  

Organizations with this baseline of data management maturity will get better value from their BI investments. They are also more likely to outperform organizations less mature in data management.