An Economic Cause of Data Strategy Failures

A key aspect of a data strategy is often to share valuable data across the many organizations that make up a business enterprise. Many technologies, such as data warehouses, master data management and data services, have been implemented to support such a strategy. Yet, these technologies often have poor success rates in achieving strategic data sharing goals. For example, Gartner estimates that MDM only succeeds less than 25% of the time.

This presentation describes an under-appreciated and often unmanaged core reason for this high failure rate based on the economics of data and data sharing. In particular, it addresses:

How many businesses use an internal market mechanism to manage the supply of goods and services, including data, throughout the business
How market mechanisms fail to effectively supply some types of goods and services
How data possesses economic characteristics that will cause a free market for shared data to fail
How this market failure leads to the failure of strategic data sharing initiatives
What business executives and strategists can do to prevent these failures

With over 40 years of experience, Richard Howey has been involved in data management and governance since the early days of relational databases to the current emerging world of big data. He has been a consultant with big 5 consulting firms as well as an employee at Fortune 50 companies. This has given him the opportunity to be a part of many successful and unsuccessful strategic data management initiatives at numerous companies. This experience has taught him that the primary reasons for lack of data management success are non-technical and generally outside the control of a data management project. He is currently working on a doctorate degree where his research dissertation is examining how the culture of a business enterprise affects the success of data sharing initiatives such as master data management.