Corporate concern
- Article 5 of 6
- Database Marketing, September 2006
Software choice is widening as corporate awareness of data quality rises and demand for customer data management software increases. Robert Buckley discusses what functions are needed to extend data cleansing across the enterprise.
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Data cleansing is a job that needs to be done frequently and well. Marketing has had to learn this the hard way, and over time the tools and datasets necessary to clean data have become a familiar entry in most marketing budgets. But for some time now, other areas of the business have been learning that they too need clean data. From call centres to accounts departments, data cleansing tools are becoming an increasingly important part of the IT infrastructure.
Gartner analyst Debra Logan argues that organisations that consciously ignore or have a complacent attitudes toward enterprise information management (EIM) and data quality will “struggle to maintain their status in increasingly competitive and agile business environments”. Companies that follow best practices in EIM will achieve a competitive advantage by mid-2007, she argues, and she’s already seeing movement in that direction in financial services, life sciences and other companies with a high quantity of data to manage.
Certainly, some enterprise software vendors seem to agree with her that EIM is on the rise. Business intelligence company Business Objects acquired First Logic in June to add data cleansing to its EIM portfolio.
“Data quality is a pre-requisite and really important for units to consider before making decisions,” says Kristin McMahon, product marketing manager, data quality, of Business Objects. “Going forward, it’s something that organisations aren’t going to be able to ignore.”
Marcus Brook of Data Discoveries highlights, for example, problems facing companies in financial services. “Data quality used to be a pretty turgid subject, just about names and addresses – nothing to get excited about. But many companies in financial services don’t know where 21% of their customers live. That’s a huge drag on costs. When a pension matures, where do you send the cheque? There’s tens of millions of pounds sitting in bank accounts because the companies haven’t maintained relationships. But with proper data quality, you can find out where the costs are coming from and develop strategies around that.”
It’s this realisation that data quality is affecting business decisions as well as just mailshots that is causing the shift in attitude. Martin Doyle, CEO of DQ Global, says the pressure for improved, organisation-wide data quality is coming from the top. “There’s a top-down push from business execs. And the business execs are saying, ‘I want score-carding, I want business intelligence, I want to make decisions based upon facts.’ And then the IT people are running away in a panic, the marketing people are running away in a panic and they’re saying, ‘But our data’s rubbish.’ ‘Well, then you’d better sort it out, hadn’t you?’ And then they start looking at the wider aspects of sorting the data out.”
Nottingham-based Ikano, for example, realised it needed to improve its data quality, not just to avoid losses to the business, but to help save customers from themselves. The company specialises in store-cards, interest-free credit, personal loans and support services to retailers to underwrite credit and loyalty schemes.
Ikano uses credit-rating data to decide whether its products are suitable for individual customers. It also tries to identify holders of more than one card to determine if they’re at risk of building up unmanageable debt.
“In the past, we had developed our own software in-house but we suspected it wasn’t picking up all the records of matching names,” says marketing analyst John Duncombe. “If a name appeared as ‘Miss A Williams’, it wouldn’t recognise it as the same as ‘Amy Williams’. We can’t just list all the cards a person has on the same record because we have to keep a separate record for use of each card - we can’t share customer data between companies.”
Ikano ended up buying the matchIT suite from helpIT to solve its data cleansing problems. Like First Logic, though, helpIT already had functions built into its software that appealed to departments other than marketing. For the most part, it seems to be the rule that only those vendors that have deliberately addressed the needs of the rest of the business have been able to make real headway.
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