In: Operations Management
Of the five common characteristics of high quality information (accuracy, completeness, consistency, uniqueness, timeliness) which do you think is the most difficult to maintain and why? What steps should organizations take to ensure this characteristic?
I feel, consistency of information all across the organization is very important and most difficult to maintain as there are multiple storage points of the same information. Whenever the information gets updated, it becomes challenging to modify all of the storage points as people may not be aware of all the touch points. Example: The information shared may be saved in presentation by CEO, in excel sheet by Finance head, in other excel sheet by Procurement head etc. Due to presence of multiple points, there are high chances of inconsistency and data credibility gets lost.
To ensure data consistency, it is important to have interlink age between storage points so that when information is updated in master sheet, auto update must happen in all the files. It is possible through use of cloud storage platform like Google sheets etc. Also, there needs to be single master file which must be referred and used for information sharing whenever required to have consistency.
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