Data is now finally being recognised as an asset it any business and not just a by-product of doing business. As with anything on your balance sheet though, a regular stock-take is required to understand its value. The value of most data diminishes over time and only by understanding its age, lineage and location, can you get a true picture of your organisation's data assets. The data audit is a necessary step toward defining your company's data strategy.
As with any audit process, a suitable, objective framework needs to be agreed to fit your organisation. Every team or department needs to have representation. Every system, process and application needs consideration. Every step, link and conversion needs to be captured. An audit can therefore follow any one of these frameworks:
Once the agreed framework is in place, a thorough search on the data assets needs to start. Critical to the usefulness of the information gathered from the exercise are the following details:
Finding the right level of detail is also critical to the usefulness of the exercise, rarely is a field-level or even record-level audit required. More often the audit can be successful at the system or document level. What is key is that is meets the level of understanding required to successfully implement the organisational data strategy.