Why A Lack Of Data Integrity Can Hurt Business Earnings

Trust – being assured of or placing confidence in someone or something…being able to rely on the character, ability, strength or truth of that person or thing. A cornerstone of doing business, yet so easily broken – especially when it comes to the management of data. Trust and relationships can be described as the true currency of business. Without it, no transactions are possible, sales are lost, the best employees leave and leaders lose influence. 

Covered In This Article

What is data integrity? 
The importance of data integrity 
Factors affecting data integrity
Types of data integrity 
Data corruption
Using data for business growth
It’s an ongoing cycle

What is data integrity? 

In the same vein, there is data integrity – the accuracy and consistency of data throughout the lifecycle of the organisation. Data integrity is sometimes confused with data quality, the latter of which is concerned with accuracy. Data quality is essentially a foundation of data integrity but the elements of validity, consistency, and completeness serve to complement those of security and real-time integration of data across different technologies. And therein lies true data integrity. If your customer updates their data through one business portal, they expect all records across the business to be updated. They do not have the time or energy to have to repeat the process several times – they rely on business to get it right the first time. 

Customers also expect you to protect the data they share with you. Data integrity, therefore, includes safeguarding of data in compliance with regulations, such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and security measures in place around data. Maintaining data integrity requires the design phase of business processes to incorporate relevant rules and standards. Data integrity allows for information stored in an organisation’s database to remain reliable, accurate and complete regardless of the period for which it is stored or how frequently it is accessed. As one of the aspects of data integrity, data security is aimed at protecting data from unauthorised access. According to Digital Guardian, data integrity can be viewed as a state (meaning a data set is valid and accurate) or as a process (involving measures used to ensure the validity and accuracy of the said data set or all data within a database). The data integrity process will incorporate error-checking and data validation methods.

The importance of data integrity 

To understand the importance of data integrity, let’s consider a few examples of where things went wrong: 

• 2008, Brazil – the government’s online logging permit system is hacked. Ironically, the government intended to conduct business online, save on paper costs and even help the environment. But, with hackers successfully accessing the system and falsifying online records to increase timber transport allocations for certain areas of the Amazon rainforest, nearly 1.7 million cubic metres of illegally felled logs were smuggled out of the Amazon – not quite the desired effect that the government wanted when launching their online logging permit system. In fact, it could rather be labelled somewhat of an environmental disaster. 
• 2016, World Anti-Doping Agency– in this incident the data was breached and medical information of many well-known athletes was released after being altered – simply to sway public opinions and destroy the athletes’ reputations through misinformation. 
• 2020, SolarWinds – a major US provider of IT software to more than 30 000 customers (including government entities and large companies) are hacked by way of malicious software, resulting in the installation of malware and ultimately spying on the private data of customers. One of these customers included the US Department of Homeland Security. 
• 2021, Facebook – personal information of 533-million users is posted on a hacking forum for free, affecting people from 106 different countries. Information leaked included names, dates of birth, phone numbers, locations and email addresses. This allowed cyber-criminals to impersonate people to gain access to even more sensitive information and convince people to disclose login details through phishing scams. 

The above reveals some of the biggest risks when data is breached – misinformation and empowerment of illegal activities. Reputational harm to companies that have been hacked could result in significant numbers of customers finding alternative suppliers. Why? Because the trust has been broken. 

A lack of data integrity exposes businesses and consumers to numerous risks – from falsified or incomplete patient records to unauthorised financial account changes and transactions, such as denying access to the real owner of the monies or moving it around to fund terrorist activities. Unfortunately, the extent of some data breaches only becomes evident after customers have experienced the negative consequences attached to such breaches. 

The benefits of data integrity include promoting the confidence and willingness of those you engage with to start or continue doing business with your organisation. Preserving the trust of your customers is key to maintaining your existing customer base. One way of preserving trust is through data integrity. 

Data integrity is also crucial to comply with regulations like GDPR. Non-compliance exposes businesses to significant penalties and the risk of litigation. Continued transgressions of these regulations could even lead to businesses closing down. 

By applying proper policies, processes and procedures regarding data collection, storage and transmission, you can keep data safe from internal and external threats. By ensuring that internal users handle data in accordance with proper protocols, and implementing relevant data validation and error checks, you will be able to protect sensitive data from losing its integrity. 

Factors affecting data integrity

Various factors may affect the integrity of data stored within a business database. These include: 

• Errors in data capturing, duplication or deletion of data, and non-compliance by employees (the ever present element of human error) with data-related policies and procedures may negatively impact the integrity of the data
• Transfer errors may occur when a piece of data cannot successfully transfer from one location in a database to another
• System bugs and viruses, including malware and spyware, can invade computer systems and falsify or alter, steal or even delete data
• Hardware malfunctions such as computer or server crashes or other device failures may render data incorrect or incomplete or may limit access to data.

With the volumes of data being processed and stored, the risks that businesses are exposed to when it comes to data integrity, can have a massive impact on the decision-making processes, related business performance, efficiencies and revenues. 

Following a well-thought-out data integrity strategy, which encompasses all the required elements of data quality, data security and data governance (including compliance with regulations), can contribute to your business having one source of truth when it comes to data for decision-makers. Having one source of truth, builds confidence that business decisions are based on accurate, reliable and complete data, which has been collated, stored, searched, recovered and connected across the entire business for as long as needed, in compliance with the relevant data regulation requirements. 

Simply having thousands of actual or potential customer email addresses does not guarantee that your business will be capable of generating promising leads, which could contribute towards sustainable growth. A massive customer database can be valuable but without a proper strategy in place for utilising it in the correct manner, this asset could quickly turn into a liability for your business. 

With poor-quality data, your business is at risk of making incorrect decisions, annoying your leads with inaccurate messaging and poor customer experiences. This is guaranteed to make your customers turn elsewhere, leaving you with lost leads, lost sales and reduced revenues. If your business data has been corrupted, you also risk having a false impression of your business performance, causing you to waste valuable resources on sales and other activities when it comes to generating business and growing revenues. 

Types of data integrity 

Physical data integrity refers to how your data is captured, stored, used and transferred between applications. The data will have physical integrity where it is kept secure, and not exposed to physical risks such as hacking, power outages, or other natural disasters. This risk can easily be reduced through using cloud-based storage with reputable cloud-based service providers. 

Logical data integrity involves the accuracy and reliability of your data. Risks to logical data integrity include design flaws, software bugs, and human error. Through reliable, detailed and thoroughly documented business processes and systems, you are able to manage this risk by implementing various data related controls. Examples include data validation checks, error checks and two-way data synchronisation. 

Data corruption

The opposite of data integrity is data corruption. This is a significant risk to your business and can happen when: 

• Poor quality of data is captured into the database
• Data captured loses its quality over time through lack of maintenance and data cleansing and/or 
• Data is hacked. 

To reduce the risks of data corruption, you need to implement proper data lifecycle management throughout all your business processes. This can include: 

• Collection – Capture only the data that you have permission to store and ensure that it is valid, accurate, complete and relevant; use validation checks when capturing to help achieve this type of quality data. 
• Storage – For data to have integrity you need to ensure that it remains accurate, complete and consistent for the entire period of storage and use. Implementing proper access controls are key to reducing the risk of unauthorised access and changes to your data. 
• Maintenance and cleansing – Regular data cleansing is one of the most important ways you can ensure that your data remains intact. Real-time sharing of data via synchronisation between applications, can help reduce the risk of errors creeping in when having to import and export data. At the same time you need to ensure your data is clean – remember to purge data that has been identified as outdated, duplicated or incorrect and no longer compliant with relevant data regulations.  
• Usage – Having volumes of data means nothing if you do not use it to understand and optimise your business processes and activities. High data integrity allows for better decision-making across your organisation. 
• Audits – There are various tools (some are free) available to identify data issues and grade the quality of your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) data. Make sure you know the type of data issues you face in your database, so you can take targeted actions to address the root causes and improve your data integrity. 
  

Using data for business growth 

Data can be used to guide your business to its true north - through giving management the performance insights needed to make good business decisions. Volumes of data made available through multiple connected systems can generate valuable information that you can use to steer your business to achieve its overall strategy and goals. 

Using data optimally can help you discover new target markets, analyse existing markets, clarify data workflows, track customer engagements and keep you ahead of the competition. It is highly likely that 80% of your revenues come from your top 20% of customers. Focusing your efforts on that top 20% can therefore help you grow your business – but only if you make decisions based on the correct information. Maintaining data integrity to make the right decisions can help you avoid wasting your sales and marketing efforts. 

It is not only customer data that is important. Maintaining employee related data is just as critical – ensuring that you have accurate employee information, clear goals and tracking of results will empower your employees to develop their talent and skills, help you build a strong team and elevate your business. Empowered employees, who have access to accurate and complete performance and compensation data, will be able to make better decisions when it comes to sales and overall customer satisfaction – all paving the way for enhanced business earnings. Your team’s ability to easily access and work with data regardless of application or location, and the assurance that the data being reported is valid and accurate, can help you quickly identify and reduce your pain points (for more on pain points, see our blog on “How processes can make or break your business”).

It’s an ongoing cycle

Data integrity is an ongoing project that deserves high-level support, time and attention in your business. Starting with what you capture, how you store, maintain, move and use the data, maintaining and cleansing your data is just as important. Only with one source of truth can you make business decisions that can help you truly grow your business and your earnings. Using this approach will also help you strengthen your customer and relationships through the most critical of all ingredients: trust.