Archive for the ‘Data Services’ Category

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Stop using Customer Relationship Management systems – and learn about possibilities to make dealing with customer information easier

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

knock_1691050

Have you ever tried to get contact details in and out of a CRM system, and ended up with a bigger mess? I have. The concept is easy: store all information about prospects and customers in one system, allowing you to have your communication efforts streamlined.

Reality, however, is harder: contact details entered on your website should be fed to the system automatically. Sending your periodic newsletter should be based on the details in your CRM system. Not to mention dealing with information on bounces. Integrating your CRM system(s) with mass mailing, campaign management and self service portals is helpful, but for some reason the major means of transporting lead and customer information still seems to be Excel… Leaving you with the necessity to mass import results, new contacts and changed information. (more…)

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Adieu Marcel …..

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

french-waiter 3

Everybody who has ever been on holiday in France has probably had a neighbour named Gaston, Jacques, Louis, Claire or Françoise . We are used to those first names, they evocate the “France profonde”, sleepy villages at the end of a road, films of Pagnol or Rohmer. Walks along the Seine in de shadow of “Notre Dame” in the spring. Coffee at a terrace of the Boulevard Saint-Germain where an obsequious garçon, named Marcel, is looking at your girl friend or wife in a way you dot not really appreciate. This particular image of France is in danger. In a few years our total frame of reference could have disappeared.

Nowadays French parents let their imagination go freely when they are choosing first names for their children. Looking at recent entries in the civil registry, you will find rather unusual first names like Bulle, Héribert, Loeva, Hermès, Evolène, and Argan.
These first names have all kind of origins. For example, they can be a combination of first names (Timéo, which is derived from Timothée and Théo),or they are different writing forms of known first names (Lilou becomes Lee-Lou). We can also find names from Greek or Celtic mythology or even from literature, like Arwen, a character from the novel Lord of the Rings. (more…)

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Data Cleansing with intelligent identification

Thursday, April 16th, 2009

clean-data

In many cases an inductive method of data cleansing is the way to go. With the right tools and expertise you can inspect, transform  and cleanse entities in a database and reach high levels of data quality without the need to use external reference data. In some cases, however, only working with the internal data and inductively identifying and fixing data patterns is not sufficient. Let’s take a practical example: a bank needs to report on a particular segment of its clients to German bank supervisor BaFin – the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority aka Bundesanstalt für Finanzdienstleistungsaufsicht. The bank apparently has done its homework and has created a central database containing all entities needed for the compliance check. Moreover, the bank has worked out a rather complex set of rules how data must be processed and corrected. One of the most important anchor points in this specific framework is the separation between B2C and B2B entities and for the latter the exact identification of the correct legal form. But what if you cannot trust this identification? (more…)

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WOA – SOA is not a disease anymore!

Tuesday, January 6th, 2009

top104Number 7 in Gartner’s top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2009 is Web Oriented Architecture. With Data Value in your mind you could argue that this might be a typo and that we would expect here SOA – Service Oriented Architecture.

The term SOA is introduced already many years ago by Roy Schulte and Yefim Natis - also from Gartner. And even at the time of the introduction of SOA one could start a dispute about the differences between SOA and CBD – Component Based Development. And there are similarities between that dispute and the dispute between WOA and SOA. My take on it is that already from the beginning of ICT or software engineering one is trying to conquer complexity and still remain the benefits of flexibility or agility. The more the technology becomes mature, the more we are able to tackle this paradox. (more…)

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Enrich your contact data by your contacts

Saturday, January 3rd, 2009

top10This blog is about enrichment of data value, how easy do you want to have it. And in such a way that you don’t need to do it yourself but that your contacts themselves will provide you the enriched information.

Number 6 in Gartner’s top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2009 is all about Social software and networks. Their focus is mainly on the benefits of using the growing virtual social networks for commercial reasons. For Data Value I see 2 observations:

  1. The data value within and accross social networks. Within because it becomes harder and harder to find the right person, e.g. LinkedIn and search on Henk de Ruiter you will see actual multiple entries for the same person, and … no wonder you will find actually the same  person via the ID Henk deRuiter. The cause for these duplications are as for any other datasource. Users (the actual individuals) didn’t know how to use the system (e.g., make a new ID per company that you worked for) or the systems cannot handle the linguistical and cultural challenges of the world. Since a couple of years we see more and more of these networks in coopetition. Where the networks ’smartly’ use the ID – firstname + lastname – to collect personal and network information. This is not always correct. The challenge is even more in the synchronization, nobody changes things on all networks and everybody trusts that ‘the systems’ will do the right synchronizations. Initiatives of OpenSocial  can help in this area.
    (more…)

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End the year with some data quality fun!

Monday, December 29th, 2008

A very funny example of what difference a single character mistake can make. 

My Dad Wants a Horse but my Mom says no
My Dad Wants a Horse but my Mom says no

A happy new year and be sure to visit DataValueTalk.com in 2009 for continued data value.

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Not every Cloud has a silver lining

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008

Cloud Computing or Cloud Services that’s the ultimate dream we have. It doesn’t bother anymore where services are running, we need a handle to it and it can start raining. Pending on which part of the world you live, you like clouds or not. For someone with lastname “van Holland” it’s almost hard to believe that he needs to trust the clouds!  

Number 3 on Gartner’s list on Top technology strategies for 2009 is dealing about Cloud Computing. And a  more detailed blog with the challenging title “Delivering Cloud Services: ISVs – Change or Die or both!” on that topic can be found on the blog of Daryl Plummer.

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Posted in Data Governance, Data Quality, Data Quality on Demand, Data Services, Top 10 Tech Strategies 2009 | 1 Comment »

Top 10 Technical Strategies for 2009

Tuesday, December 9th, 2008

Recently - close your eyes and imagine the meaning of recently in this climate of economic crisis – David Cearley from Gartner published a blog on the most important technical strategies for 2009. In a couple of blogs I want to pick some of them and emphasize my view on them in relation to data value.

In general I agree with the top 10 of technological strategies, be there some slight personal priority adaptations, but let’s focus on that in later blogs. The missing point is in my opinion the lack of emphasis on risk mitigation, and I do realize that things changed since October 2008. Which technologies can we adopt to avoid that we provide services, products, at the end money to the wrong contacts, or that we are sure to deliver it to the right contacts. The technology strategy of Master Data Management, Know your customer, Single View of X, or how we call it, will need our attention in 2009!

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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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