Most companies perform annual evaluations of their other key asset—people—each year to help develop talent. Any legitimate company performs a routine assessments of their financial assets, often in the form of quarterly and annual reports. On a personal level, we have regular dental check-ups and physicals to assess our physical health, and accept feedback to make needed improvements. We should be doing the same with our data. Mechanisms such as the EDM Council’s DCAM is one very good way to do this.
Complacency is a killer in our industry. There is much we can learn from one another through assessing where we are today, sharing the results to enrich industry benchmarks, and comparing approaches with others to identify best of breed solutions. Sitting in isolation while others take critical evaluations to find their weaknesses and address them can lead to only one eventual outcome. Each of us has seen the proverbial dinosaurs in our industry, smug in their position and no longer seeking to improve, blissfully unaware that they are walking into the tar pits like the dinosaurs. But not you and I! We aren’t afraid to test ourselves and find where we can improve. It’s exam time, are you ready?