Loraine Lawson blogs about an Ovum study that finds a strong connection between poor application performance and poor data management. “Specifically,” she reports, “85 percent of the companies complained of application performance problems and the leading culprits trace back to bad data practices such as a lack of standardization, inadequate archiving practices and too many point interfaces. The study also found that 20-30 percent of data is duplicated across applications, which increases application maintenance costs and creates problems for data migration, synchronization and retention.”
It's always useful to have figures for these kinds of effects. Numbers help us quantify and share the impact of data management practices. Without the numbers, we know we've got problems, but we don't know how to make our colleagues appreciate them.
It's also unusual in my experience for application performance issues to be traced back to data management competence. Since application performance is something that affects everyone's daily experience, we should be making more of the link. If your applications aren't responsive then you're losing valuable time. If your applications are giving you the wrong data then the business is at risk.
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