Pursuing data quality is not necessarily only due to regulatory norms. A number of companies do it “to make correct decisions and have reliable business processes, that is, usable with confidence in the entire company with shared responsibilities and a more central role of Data Stewards“. These are the distinctive features of the approach to Data Management in Energy & Utilities, as evident from the DAMA Italy 2022 Survey presented at the annual convention in Bologna.

8 national companies in the sector were interviewed for the third edition of the study, which previously considered data management in banking (2020, 10 companies) and insurance (2021, 7 companies). DAMA Italy is the Italian chapter of the international association of data experts, with over 50 chapters active worldwide and thousands of certified professionals (CDMPs).
President Nino Letteriello (who is also the coordinator of EMEA area) and Vice President Franco Francia underlined the numbers in their opening speech: over 250 members and 22 corporate members, as well as 8 working groups and 30 speeches at events.

Levels of maturity and advantages

“Data Quality management brings out the differences between the three sectors studied during these years. The banks received a push from the regulatory bodies, while the energy companies are applying a light version of this discipline”, Egle Romagnolli, Irion Head of Marketing explained at her presentation of the DAMA research with Alice Carretti.

As is visible in the comparative radar charts, on five levels of development (where 1 is the “stage of initial interest” and 5 the maximum maturity in terms of “process management, use of metrics, and risk reduction”), the highest peaks in the energy sector concern Data Integration and interoperability (3.4), followed by Data Storage and Operations (3.3). On the other hand, the current average levels of adopting such disciplines as Data Modeling (1,4) and Data Governance (2) are lower.

Still, it is precisely solid data governance that ensures higher default quality of data, especially if it is necessary to integrate some data sources. “In such cases, the structured Data Governance by design process guarantees Data Quality from the beginning,” Egle Romagnolli emphasized.

The value of Data Lineage

A surprising aspect is the tendency to use Data Lineage: “Why does a sector not obliged to do so invest time and resources in this activity?” The expert explained: “The respondents told us explicitly that creating a lineage structure makes more evident the impacts of editing or deleting data and allows tracing the actors involved to know who to turn to in case of a structural error in data. It defines the chain of responsibilities.”

Like a cartographer drawing a map, Data Modeling allows navigating business processes and brings several advantages. Companies emphasize the possibility to “understand what to insert in the reporting“, “make the data origins evident to those who use the reporting”, and “identify possible impacts related to changes in processes and their articulations”.

Data, time, and people: what makes Irion EDM® different

Since 2004, the Irion EDM® platform has positioned itself in the Enterprise Data Management market as a leader in banking and insurance and kept expanding in energy and utilities. Its end-to-end approach allows optimizing all data management business processes (wherever they are) to deliver the right data to the right people at the right time.

In 2021 and 2022, Irion received two prestigious Honorable Mentions in Gartner Magic Quadrant dedicated to Data Quality Solutions. Gartner is the world leader in research on IT market and software vendors.