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Information Quality and ROI wasn’t the title of Andrew’s presentation. However, it could have been. Andrew gave a very entertaining run through his experiences not as a ‘data quality guy’ but as a CEO of a leading edge company seeking to do things with data and information. In Andrew’s words he’s a “business guy”, with a background in McKinsey Consulting amongst other roles.

The gist of Andrew’s presentation was a run through the process by which his business (GroceryPower) has developed and the critical and central role that quality information plays in that business.

I don’t want to rehash the details of Andrew’s presentation here but, suffice it to say, without good quality information, or more accurately, without an approach to taking diversely formatted information that doesn’t necessarily follow natural language patterns and often has bizarre abbreviations, then the business idea that Andrew had would be infinitely more challenging. Indeed, Andrew described the Information Quality issues in his business as being the “mack truck” that hit them very early on.

However, Andrew’s people have developed strategies to management of information quality improvement that enable what Andrew calls “continuous breakthroughs” - step changes in capability and ability to do things with data that I would describe as continuous improvement on steroids. Lots and lots of steroid

Apart from his insights into his philosophy and approach [I noted them down as kill hierarcies, statistics aren’t the only tool, people are bad, and continuous breakthroughs are possible and should be common  -but I’m sure I missed some of them). Andrew also entertained with some insights into the metaphors his team developed to describe what it was they were building…

Andrew’s presentation was one of the clearest illustrations I’ve seen of the value of information quality and an information quality aware approach to business strategy.

Andrew’s presentation was even more impressive given that he had put it together again this morning after his laptop crashed.