Staying Ahead of Data Debt

Problem 1: Data resources and BI tables were once created but unused by anyone in the organization. Problem 2: Everyone seems to have different ways of calculating similar metrics. Problem 3: My data documentation is outdated the second I finish documenting it.

Data teams work as fast as possible to make sure that the business team is using the right information to make decisions. This pace and pressure creates data debt.

We've learned that most teams put this process off today not because they don’t want to, but because they feel like the work done to document and manage data is never complete and always outdated.

The problem with putting data governance off is that it creates inefficiencies that compound over time.

Putting off data governance creates data debt. Data debt is when you have undocumented, unused, incomplete and inconsistent data and it becomes a problem for teams much earlier than most teams realize.

This problem costs organizations directly and indirectly. The direct costs are related to data storage and compute. Data storage costs have decreased and will continue to drop, but compute is still a widely value and price resource. Running jobs to update tables that are not used costs the organization direct compute resources that have no benefit. Additionally, Collecting unused, undocumented, muddled data makes it much more difficult to find the right information.

Today, most teams don’t evaluate their data debt. Instead, they continue to collect data and dashboards, regardless of their value to the organization. Decreasing data debt will decrease technology costs and significantly increase productivity.

We've built a simple tool that gives teams a simple dashboard to manage their data. Teams can add documentation, remove tables and collaborate with other employees to stay ahead of data debt with www.secoda.co. We’re excited to share Secoda with everyone looking to benefit from data management at an early stage.