ALVIN TAN | Principal Consultant, Capco

Data sourcing and cleansing is often cited by data scientists to be amongst the most critical, yet most time-consuming aspects of data science. This article examines how data management capabilities, such as data governance and data quality management, can not only reduce the burden of data sourcing and preparation, but also improve quality and trust in the insights delivered by data science. Establishing strong data management capabilities ensures that less time is spent wrangling data to enter into an analytics model and more time is left for actual modeling and identification of actionable business insights. We find that organizations that build analytics data pipelines upon strong data management foundations can extract fuller business value from data science. This provides not only competitive advantage through the insights identified, but also comparative advantage through a virtuous circle of data culture improvements.