The Importance of Data Management
Two attributes that successful companies have in common is that they are agile, and they operate within cash flow. They do this by mastering the fundamentals, beginning with data management.
Data either works for you or against you. It does not stay still. Data either stays clean or gets dirty. It saves time or wastes time. It enhances your performance or hinders it. Older practices and habits have left paper files in boxes or legacy systems. A critical downside to this practice is that it keeps practices surrounding dirty data slow, risky, and inefficient.
A clean data workflow includes accurate and maintained lease records. Files are digitized and have consistent taxonomies and formatting and intuitive file naming. Taking it further, all assets and agreements are mapped and available to the entire company in a modern land system with a GIS user interface.
Steps to Take Control of Your Data
Most organizations should be able to implement steps towards taking control of their data and delivering maximum value. For internal data, this is, at a minimum, digitizing all land records and files and employing optical character recognition, mapping all of the assets and agreements for visual representation, and creating and abiding by processes that mitigate backlog. For external data, it is taking advantage of one or more providers who provide courthouse and regulatory information, illustrating leasing activity and operations of peers and competitors.
For organizations that are more ambitious, they can apply advanced OCR software and human-assisted artificial intelligence to have more efficient workflows. Our successful integrations of these principles have resulted in having access to answers in minutes, instead of days or hours, and we have found that data integrity projects routinely deliver 100%+ ROI.
Intelligent Land Operations
Based on our experience working with multiple organizations large and small, we developed Intelligent Land Operations. This theory is comprised of six steps that lay out what land departments need to be doing to evolve and survive while maintaining their low G&A.
In the following installments, we will go through each step of the Intelligent Land Operations hierarchy and the actions you can take to evolve. This series is not asking you to forget everything you know about land and land administration, but it will challenge you to think differently about how common key functions have been performed. It will also provide ideas and insights to consider in order to create the most value for investors and stakeholders in any environment.
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