The rice bowl effect: Why integration should be judged by its lifetime cost

Across Asia, a rice bowl earns its value the same way a system integration does: not by how it looks on day one, but by whether it still does its job years later. Most organisations know what it costs to build an integration. Far fewer know what it costs to own one. Industry research puts the average cost of poor data quality at close to 13 million US dollars a year per organisation, and 60 to 80 per cent of enterprise IT budgets going toward maintaining what already exists rather than building anything new (1). Most firms are already carrying this cost. Few have measured it.