The study, entitled Wedding Divorced Data Sets: Data Maturity and Governance for Institutional and Retail Asset Managers, found that only half (46 per cent) of senior-level management teams are spending time and money in bringing together various data sets.
A further 23 per cent appreciate the importance of data management, confirming that they are looking to overhaul their current processes and implement some sort of programme in the foreseeable future.
“An assessment of data maturity should consider the quality of each of the individual data sets, including whether the data is fit for internal and external use and whether the firm can extract and combine those data sets across the enterprise,” advised Virginie O’Shea, senior analyst in institutional securities and investments at Aite Group.
“The data management team’s timely ability to respond to business end-user requirements, external reporting requirements, and less latency in the on-boarding of new products and clients is also important and can relate directly to reduced maintenance costs.”
Speaking to Investment News, Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Centre for Digital Business and Professor of Information Technology, commented that more executives need to be involved in this process.
The reason, he explains is relatively self-explanatory – greater integration of data leads to better, more successful outcomes. Data strategy therefore has to be elevated to the boardroom.
However, bosses need to be informed and understand data – they cannot execute decisions based on intuition, Mr Brynjolfsson was keen to add.
“A serious pitfall is when a manager comes to a decision using gut instinct, and then they go and tell the IT department to gather some data to support that decision,” he said. “It ought to be integrated right from the start.”