Here's one key takeaway from the conversation:
Assessing Your Organization's Data Quality
Most companies are sitting on a mountain of bad data, and they don’t even realize it.
Want to see how inefficiently data is being recorded and communicated across your organization? Try this simple exercise—it’ll be an eye-opener:
Grab a whiteboard. Skip the tech, get a physical whiteboard.
📝List out all the key types of data you handle (Product data, customer data, asset data, etc.)
📝Map out the system of record for each (What system is the ultimate source of truth?)
📝Map the system of reference—the systems that depend on this data.
Now ask yourself a few critical questions:
→ How do you decide when a product is sellable?
→ What channels is it going to?
→ When and how do you deprecate it?
→ Are you maximizing each channel?
Here’s what you’ll find: Most companies have multiple systems of record, and they don’t even know it.
You’ll likely see data scattered across spreadsheets, emails, databases, and platforms. Every team has their own version of the truth.
It’s a data nightmare—thousands of different systems of record that can never truly align.
Now think about syndicating that data across 30, 50, or 100 different marketplaces. The chances of everything matching?
Low. Very low.
This exercise shows how critical it is to clean up your data before you scale. You can’t just throw technology at the problem and hope it works. You have to start with the right foundation.
That’s where systems integrators come in. They help map out the chaos and create real solutions that start from the ground floor of data organization, and work their way up into increasing complexity and functionality.
Then, once your data is in order, solutions like Syndic8 can take that clean, structured information and help you syndicate it quickly and accurately across multiple channels.
Hear more from me and Jacobi Zakrzewski as we touch on the importance of clean data and what you can do to tidy it up.
-Chris