Archive for November, 2008

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The obfuscated address contest

Sunday, November 23rd, 2008

Programmers sometimes organize contests in writing code that is perfectly understandable for a compiler, but very difficult to understand for people.

When working on products for address standardisation, one can discover an interesting variant: people sometimes write – unintentionally, I suppose – addresses in such a way that they are rather understandable for people, but very difficult to process for computers.

Consider for example this street name:

Kerkchoosteeg hoogl

The official version is:

Hooglandsekerk-choorsteeg (’high land church – choir alley’)

This street contains a couple of errors:

  • A hyphen is missing.
  • One ‘r’ is missing.
  • One word (’Hooglandsekerk’) has been split up into two words.
  • The first word (’Hooglandse’) is written at the end.
  • One word is abbreviated (’hoogl’).

The first two errors are not very special, but the last three can only be discovered in common: it can only be discovered that the word ‘hooglandsekerk’ has been split up into two words, if at the same time it is understood that the left part has been abbreviated and moved to the end.
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ROI of Data Quality: Do you really need to know?

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

What ROI?

It must have been around 2002, that I was discussing the Return On Investment of Data Quality solutions with one of the founders of Human Inference, Norbert Mergen. While discussing the well known benefits: less return mail, more effective campaigns, reduction of debitor risk, single customer view, … I brought another subject at the table: isn’t it strange that we really do ROI calculations on such an obvious need? Did you ever create a fence in the garden and question the ROI of a hammer? We published on this matter in dutch back in 2002 in the CRM Marketing Centre and included the hammer discussion. And now, in 2008, it is so interesting to see that many people nowadays have put the same questions, reading the blog of Jack Vinson ”Stop thinking ROI, think success!” Anyway, it may not convince your management, so you will still need to do the maths, but just bringing the subject to the table may help you getting your data quality project going.

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Posted in Data Governance, Data Quality, MDM for customer data | No Comments »

ING: Customer Information is Power

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

ING

ING is looking to make more use of its customer data for behavioural targeting. The financial services company has seen a five-fold in customer contacts in the past few years (think of Internet banking). They also have a lot of information on each customer through they payment transactions they do. If the customer would allow ING to use this information the bank could analyst the energy, phone and other bill and deliver specific offers together with other companies.

The ING PR department rushed to tone-down the debate by saying that this is only a possible scenario. A flood of data privacy concerns would be connected to initiatives like these.

The ING idea is thought provoking. How much does you bank know about  your and the companies you do business with? How would they be able to use this and could it be of benefit to you?

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Posted in Data Quality, MDM for customer data | 1 Comment »

Data Quality in Outlook?

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008

HIquality Contact Cleanse

Microsoft Outlook must be the most used CRM application in the world, be it on the desktop or on a smartphone. A common problem with Outlook contacts is that information is often incomplete, incorrect and not formatted correctly. Specifically telephone numbers are often formatted in such a way that it won’t be accepted by your mobile phone. 

A new service launched by Human Inferences brings a remedy to this problem. The service called HIquality Contact Cleanse allowes users to simply email a vCard to contactcleanse@humaninference.com or transmit the contact from a Windows Smartphone using a downloadable application. The Contact Cleanse service then simply responds by email with the cleansed vCard as an attachment. Give it a try!

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Presentations from Data Quality Summit ‘08

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008

Please find the presentations delivered during the Data Quality Summit ‘08 “Value for Data | Data for Value”, held November 14 at the Evoluon in Eindhoven, below.

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Bashups – mashups for the business

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008

Mashup

The business needs bashups. Step away from the techy and fancy mashups and mash now the technology and graphics for the business sake. Combining the whole razzmatazz of AJAX, REST and Web2.0, and sometimes completely loose the business.

Of course, it helps that your mashup visualizes your address immediately Google maps, but … did it also check for you if the person you entered above is still living there or if the telephone number is related to the address or even more to the person. We need to look through the eyes of the business to see the actual business step that needs to be executed and see how we can utilize the mashup to retrieve the right customer on the right place on the right time with the correct telephone number in the most effective way. That will help us to be more compelling than our competition.

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Posted in Data Quality, Data Quality on Demand, Data Services | 1 Comment »

Migrating data; migrating meaning

Thursday, November 13th, 2008

Migration At first glance, migrating data from one database to another looks trivial: you can easily discover the schema or datamodel of each database, then simply map the elements of one to the other. Any ETL tool worth its acronym will let you do that.

In practice, migration is a nightmare…

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Data entry and human behaviour

Thursday, November 13th, 2008

Data Entry

The first television broadcasts were actually radio broadcasts with a person on a screen reading the radio messages. In data entry we still see the same aspects. Did you ever wonder why we still feed a computer system with data as if we were writing an address on an envelope.

In the old days we knew how to contact, or how to write, but we needed additional information for the postman in order to find the person we had in mind. So we started with the smallest granularity, namely John from the Smiths family. Than we specified the street and the house number, the postal code and city ending with the country. And we do know that the order differs per country.

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Posted in Data Quality, Data Quality on Demand, Data Services | 3 Comments »

Rapid Addressing

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008

Capturing correct address details through a telephone contact center, web form or CRM application is not always easy. In most countries of Europe the postcode contains comprehensive reference to address information and allows for rapid address entry by simply keying in the postcode and house number. This method ensures uniform collection of street names, often a source of erroneous data, and saves many keystrokes in entering the data.

Try the widget below which works with Dutch postcode and house number data. A simple input of two fields returns full address details including geocoding with map reference. If you are not familiar with the dutch postcode structure try with the following data: 6812 AR / 310.


  Postal Code 
  House Number 
 


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What’s in a name

Monday, November 10th, 2008

Name tags

First names can tell a lot about a person, a top 5 of remarkable facts.

  1. Boy names have pretty much stayed the same in the last 100 years whilst there are more and more girl names. We are much more tolerant to ‘funny’ girl names. This is because we unconsciously imagine a more professional career for our boys. 
  2. Trendy names are per definition time bound. Therefore people can guess the age quite precisely. Take Martin, he is likely 35-40. 
  3. In England people with traditional names with a royal association are regarded as more successful and intelligent. James and Elizabeth are on the top of the list of ’successfull’ names. 
  4. People in lower social classes choose more often for exotic, unknown names and are inspired by soaps and pop-stars. Higher social classes are more attracted to traditional names. 
  5. The first name is a strong indicator if you read a paper or have a mobile phone. Believe it or not, dutch publisher Wegener connects first name to consumer information and hopes to get more grip on the target group for their sales. According to the publisher a couple that calls their child Emiel are likely to have a newspaper subscription and Laura’s parents participate in a lottery.

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