For many companies losing data is one of their biggest fears. Unfortunately, this tends to lead to data hoarding, which can be nearly as big a problem as losing your data. The problem is that data hoarding gets far less attention, to the point where many companies do not even realize that they are doing it. This creates a number of other problems and issues, rippling out into other areas of your business.
What Is Data Hoarding?
Business must track a lot of information on a regular basis to ensure that they stay competitive and know what is working well for their business. However, it is possible to have too much data, which renders everything you have relatively useless. This is called data hoarding.
If you have ever asked a department to clean out a large part of the company network and there were large portions that no one knew what the data was, that is typically a sign of data hoarding. If no one has used this data (which seems likely by the fact that no one knows what it is), that data is a problem because it is taking up valuable resources without providing any benefit.
Shrinking Storage Space
The most obvious problem that stems from data hoarding is the loss of virtual space and memory because there is simply too much information. The excessive and irrelevant electronic data consumes an increasingly greater amount of your available space, making it harder for you to manage the relevant and newest data.
It can be easy to feel that this is a problem that can be quickly solved by buying more space. However, that only exacerbates some of the other problems associated with this unproductive collecting of unusable or unnecessary data.
Needle in a Hay Stack
The more data you have, the more difficult it is going to be to locate the data you actually need, and the longer it is going to take each time you try to pull relevant information. As you comb through a large data dump, you are much more likely to use numbers and information that is irrelevant. This can lead to bad decision making that will adversely affect your company over time.
Difficulty in Determining Duplicate Information and Mismanagement of Data
Keeping a clean database is one of the most difficult aspects of data management simply because so many people do not understand how to handle data. As people misenter data, they increase the chances of adding duplicate information. If you hoard data, this makes it virtually impossible to find duplicate information, which then further harms your reports and data point analysis.
The harder it is to manage data, the less reliable your data will be.
Long-term Adverse Effects
The worst problems caused by hoarding unnecessary data is that it can create inaccuracies in reports, cause management to make wrong decisions, and can stop the company from growing, instead of encouraging growth. As the amount of data you manage continues to increase, the less reliable your analyses and decisions will be because they are based on data that does not apply to the analysis. It also ends up costing you as you continue to upgrade so that you have enough space to continue adding more data.
