Archive for the ‘MDM for customer data’ Category
Monday, August 24th, 2009
The more a company knows about its customer’s wishes, needs and habits and the more that company is able to tailor its proposition accordingly, the greater the value it will eventually provide for its customers. We all know that there are countless examples where defective, fragmented, or just plain poor customer data cause unnecessary costs, decrease in revenue, employee dissatisfaction or frustation, damage of the corporate image and many other unsdesirable or painful consequences.
Customer data quality and integration problems impact every area of the value chain of organisations. Far too often companies have a multiple view of their customers. Customer Data Integration (or MDM for Customer Data) is the key to providing companies with a single view of their customer. (more…)
Tags: cdi, customer view, data processes, identification, intelligent matching, MDM for customer data
Posted in Data Quality, MDM for customer data | No Comments »
Friday, August 21st, 2009
The term Golden Record is closely related to Customer Data Integration or MDM for Customer data. It refers to the “single truth” which has been created or calculated from all those duplicate customer records from different systems. This post is not about finding or tagging all those duplicate records. There all kinds of ways to find them using advanced statistical methods, fuzzy matching etc.
But what do you once you have found the duplicates. How do you create the best possible customer data out of all gathered elements? (more…)
Tags: ACCU, deduplication, first name, golden record, matching methods, MDM for customer data
Posted in MDM for customer data | 2 Comments »
Thursday, July 2nd, 2009
Last week I travelled to India and just at that time one of the largest deduplication projects in the world had been accepted. The project is to provide every Indian citizen with a Unique Identification Number.
Main goals are (amongst others):
- Make life easier for the citizens by diminishing the number of ID documents they have now
- Minimize the fraud possibilities for several projects and welfare schemes
- Possibility to share information between different disciplines and organizations
Anyone who has ever been in India knows that you absolutely need to take into account the variety of cultural aspects in that huge country. In Western Europe it is already very difficult to deduplicate all kinds of citizen data, given all the languages and cultural aspects. I think, however, that the degree of difficulty is even worse in India, where not all citizens have a registered birth certificate, most will have their first official registration from school, some do not have a last name, addresses are not always that trivial (euphemism), and the whole country is used to the fact that typos are allowed in names, because in one area Shrivastava is actually the same as Srivastava (without ‘h’). (more…)
Tags: census 2011, deduplication India, duplicate citizen, multiple IDs, Nandan Nilekani, UID India, unique ID India, Unique Identification Authority of India
Posted in Data Quality, MDM for customer data | No Comments »
Monday, December 29th, 2008
Number 4 in the top 10 list of Gartner’s Strategic Technologies is Green IT. David Cearleys take on this is quite straightforward. On the one hand regulations and more efficient equipment will force or help to reduce unwanted emissions. For our discussions - talking about data value - I see several angles:
- Having the right contact details will reduce waste of natural resources because we bring the deliveries immediately at the right place, and it’s not only the deliveries that can be optimized, we can also avoid that deliveries get lost and natural resources are actually piped for /dev/null !
- By valueing our data through deduplication we can in general avoid to spoil needless energy – both by humans and other resources – and use the sparse energy only for those who actually need it. Here I feel the same remark as David in his blog. There comes a moment in the near future, with an rising energy prices and increasing emission penalties, that that aspect will win in the equation from the actual spoil of goods and human energy.
- Saving resources is now also done by concentrating or centralizing services – optimizing the service per energy unit. For data we see this happening in the Virtualization of data amd Master Data Management technologies. Strong place in your centralizing strategy will be the role of your data quality – that will bring your real value
I encourage you all to think out-of-the-box how data-value can help to make it a better world for the future. But I’m afraid that in this economic climate the short term is ruling and not the long(er) term.
Tags: gartner, green, top 10
Posted in Data Quality, MDM for customer data, Top 10 Tech Strategies 2009 | No Comments »
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
A happy new year and be sure to visit DataValueTalk.com in 2009 for continued data value.
Tags: fun
Posted in Data Governance, Data Quality, Data Quality on Demand, Data Services, MDM for customer data | No Comments »
Wednesday, December 10th, 2008
There are many different purposes to create a single customer view. All those different purposes also require different technical architectures. And each architectural design is capable of delivering its own value to the company. An analytical single customer view delivers value by supporting the company decision making via analytics and reporting. For instance: “how many customers do I really have in my focus market segments and what is the age distribution? “ An operational single customer view supports the primary business processes like sales and customer service. For instance an outbound call center employee can deliver additional value to the company if an integrated view on the customers shows which products and services from different business lines have already been sold to those customers and which customer support issues are still pending.
(more…)
Posted in MDM for customer data | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 9th, 2008
The first Strategic Technology to watch according to Gartner is Virtualization. And I do like their twist in the whole virtualization debate – focus on data. While the whole world is linking the word virtualization with optimizing your hardware assets by using a virtual layer on top of your hardware. By optimizing the usage of your assets in this virtual way you can significantly reduce the total cost of ownership (ToC).
David Cearley at Gartner comes with a fascinating other angle. Basically he sees virtualization also as strategic technology to virtualize the data. And by that twist, data quality and data governance appears annoyingly in the middle of your radar screen. In order to use this strategy for your operational excellence, to eliminate the number of redundant data on your real storage devices, and make a virtual layer between your applications and this virtual data storage, you need to be sure that all your applications can work seamlessly with that virtual data.
(more…)
Tags: gartner, Top 10 Tech Strategies 2009, Virtualization
Posted in Data Governance, Data Quality, MDM for customer data, Top 10 Tech Strategies 2009 | 1 Comment »
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!
Tags: gartner, top 10 strategies
Posted in Data Governance, Data Services, MDM for customer data, Top 10 Tech Strategies 2009 | 1 Comment »
Monday, December 8th, 2008
The added value of an integrated customer view depends strongly on the quality of that integrated customer view. Every organization that is seriously planning to create a single customer view should ask itself the following question: “What determines the quality of my customer view and so the accompanying level of added value?”
Prior to answering this question we need to take one step back. Why does not every organization have a single view of the customer? The cause lies in the fact that many organizations have their customer data spread across multiple systems all facilitating separate business processes. Additionally customer data is often highly polluted, fragmented and incomplete.
(more…)
Tags: cdi, demo, matching, MDM for customer data, single customer view
Posted in MDM for customer data | No Comments »
Wednesday, November 19th, 2008
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.
Tags: CRM, Hammer, ROI
Posted in Data Governance, Data Quality, MDM for customer data | No Comments »
