Corporate concern

• Article 5 of 6
• Database Marketing, September 2006
• View a PDF of the original article ~ 1.2MB

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In this service-oriented, loosely-coupled age, embedding directly into an application is neither attractive nor preferred. If data cleansing is to be done across the whole organisation, it needs to be accessible by all applications, rather than just the ones that can be embedded given a huge development budget and a team of programmers. So the ability for the software to function as a standalone server, offering its functions to any applications that asks, is becoming more and more important.

This adds an additional requirement as well: the ability to have different business rules for different cleansing requirements. Accounting may want to keep two records separate, but marketing may want to merge them to reduce costs during a mailout. So when marketing calls for a list of names from the database, the data cleansing tool needs to be able to merge names according to marketing’s requirements rather than the more conservative requirements of accounts.

Says Business Objects’ McMahan, “When you’re talking data quality throughout the enterprise, that’s a lot of work. It may be 50 different projects, say. You need a tool that provides a flexible architecture, a service-oriented architecture, where it can act as a centralised business rule repository. That makes the job of IT a lot simpler.”

Marketing apps that have these capabilities, such as those available from Trillium, DQ Global, Human Inference and Business Objects, are more than capable of appealing to the rest of the enterprise – and indeed many of their vendors are playing down the marketing origins of their applications in favour of these other functions. Yet they’re facing competition from vendors of mainstream enterprise applications who are adding data cleansing functions to their applications.

Unless those applications have been developed through acquisition, though, those mainstream applications won’t typically have the expertise necessary to take advantage of the full range of datasets available for data cleansing, without some end-user or consultant development work. For example, working with PAF will usually need to be done through integrating a smaller marketing-derived tool.

Using PAF and other datasets with these tools, when marketing or some other department might already license it for their own use, can also prove costly. Increasing use of the marketing tool to other parts of the enterprise can reduce dataset licensing costs. This inevitably means that fuller featured applications that can do address and postcode cleansing as well as other DQ functions and that can be accessed from anywhere are going to have an edge over the smaller specialised apps in the long-run.

Alternatively, some enterprises try to avoid double-licensing issues by using web services to access datasets hosted by third-parties. This also allows them to do data cleansing on the fly, paying per record cleaned. However, this doesn’t appeal to everyone, says Maurice Hickey, solutions consultant at Identex.

“Some companies are wary of doing DQ themselves, while others are wary of web services or giving data to a bureaux.” Although bulk deals can be negotiated, the variable cost of pay-per-clean puts off some companies; the high cost of a pay-per-clean run on an initial database of thousands or millions of records scares others, although an initial cleanse by a bureau followed by ongoing pay-per-click can appeal.

Marketing tools that provide more than just the algorithm, but also include datasets and the technological ‘skills’ necessary to use that dataset effectively therefore have something of an edge.

Data Discoveries’ Brooks goes one further: “The days of taking data out and sending it to third-parties is over. It’s Dickensian. Sure, the advent of web tech all over the world makes things much easier. But you’re still dealing with third-parties and none of them understand your business as well as you do.” To get a true grip on data quality means using in-house tools. And that in turn means using tools that have come from the marketing department and that have the functions needed to dispense with bureaux.

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