Letter from our CEO
At CEM, we invest heavily in data integrity and will be beta testing a new data quality score later this year.
As the leader of a data and insights firm, I am frequently asked about the quality of our data. Are we always comfortable with the data we receive? Do we use all the data we receive? Do we automatically discard substandard data? The answer to all these questions, naturally, is no.
Over the past thirty-two years, we have developed a multi-faceted approach to data integrity. It starts with our foundational principles and governance, which are connected to a series of daily actions in conjunction with two-way communication with all parties that provide data.
Let me touch on each of these aspects.
All of our data integrity efforts start with eight foundational principles which are owned by our Data Governance Committee. Our principles are based upon completeness, comparability, accuracy, confidentiality, providence, timeliness, transparency, and security.
In an ideal world, all CEM participants would provide clean, complete data sets. In reality, we often receive incomplete data sets. Where we clearly understand the context, our team is permitted to perform pre-specified, industry-standard data enrichment. However, if in our professional judgement, specific data points are not of sufficient quality, we do not use them.
We bring our data principles to life through a combination of technology, process, and expertise. The most critical steps in our data collection process include:
- Our analysts review the initial data sets and exclude any material errors or omissions.
- Once a survey is submitted, our rules engine identifies potential discrepancies.
- CEM’s internal experts then review the discrepancies and engage the survey respondent to resolve issues. In specific circumstances, our team is permitted to enrich the data.
- Where we do not have clarity around the context and confidence on the data, it is rejected.
- Lastly, our Relationship Managers perform a final check before the material is sent to you.
Historically, most of our communication on data integrity has happened through the survey cleaning process. This year we’ll be testing a new step. Each of our Investment Benchmarking Subscription clients will receive a data quality score based on:
- Investment cost data.
- Investment performance data.
- Timeliness.
The methodology is based on our Global Reporting Principles with the intention to ‘raise the bar’ every few years. As we all get more comfortable with the scoring, we will roll it out across all CEM subscriptions.
Turning to a few items I’d love to highlight in this month’s issue of Peer Intelligence:
Thanks, as always, for reading.
Rashay
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