Category Archives: Pervasive Data Quality
Harnessing Social Media With Informatica
Improving sales and service through customer centricity requires listening to and understanding your customers. And where are customers speaking these days?
You guessed it—social media. Just think about it. Each day, customers tweet 50 million times on Twitter and update their Facebook status 60 million times. Add in LinkedIn and user reviews and YouTube and blog commentary and more and you’ve got a customer data gold mine and a new frontier for marketing.
Are Line Of Business (LOB) Executives Involved In MDM Or Is It Mostly An IT Initiative?
In recent conversations, I’ve been asked whether line of business executives are getting involved in master data management (MDM), or whether MDM is still mostly an IT initiative.
Attract & Retain Customers with Informatica Customer Centricity Solution (with MDM at the core)
From our experience at Informatica, the business is absolutely involved! In fact, it’s often a high-impact business event that triggers the alarm that a company needs MDM and data quality to deliver trusted and complete data. Many times, the root cause of these business problems is inconsistent, incomplete and duplicated customer data. Two examples:
1) An $8 billion technology manufacturer implemented Informatica MDM after its IT team couldn’t quickly and accurately respond to an executive’s request for a list of the company’s top 400 B2B customers. It took IT six weeks to assemble the information because it was scattered across applications, and many large customers had complex hierarchies with multiple subsidiaries that all had to be reconciled by hand. Next step, focus on the next 400 customers. (more…)
Life Cycle Events, Customer Retention, and Data: Pulling It All Together
The last set of blog entries looked at the value of maintaining high quality data to support customer retention activities and processes in reference to life cycle events. To pull my thoughts together, we have looked at the business expectations for retention, business processes that center on life cycle events, and impacts related to data issues. The next step is to consider the underlying data requirements to maintain a high degree of information utilization. I believe we can roll this into two main sets of requirements:
- Managing high quality master data associated with the customer, key aspects of the customer’s life, and the life cycle of that customer’s purchased products and services; and
- Overseeing the observance of expectations associated with following dimensions of data quality: completeness, accuracy, currency, and timeliness.
By preventing data flaws related to master customer and master product data, the appropriate life cycle triggers will fire at the right time, leading to new business opportunities and elongated customer lifetimes. For more on this topic, read my newest white paper entitled: Increasing Confidence, and Satisfaction Through Improved Data Quality.
Navigating The Maze: Tips For Enabling Successful Data Governance
I have been talking with a lot of customers lately on the topic of data governance. Over and above the obvious question of “what is data governance”, two other common questions seem to come up, both related to helping make it a reality. Time and time again, I get questions regarding what the right approach is to data governance as well as how to effectively sell its importance to the business. Let’s explore both in a little more detail. (more…)
Introduction…
I am very honored to have been asked to become a contributing blogger to Informatica Perspectives, and I am looking forward to sharing thoughts about what I like to refer to as “information utility.” The online version of the American Heritage Dictionary defines utility as “The quality or condition of being useful,” and I would like to adapt that definition for my own purposes: establishing information utility is the process of ensuring the quality and usefulness of information.
Luckily, over the past 15 years I have been actively pursuing a number of activities and research areas that fundamental to information utility, ranging from data cleansing, data quality, identity resolution, data integration, master data management, business intelligence, data mining, all the way to data governance. Perhaps you may already be familiar with some of my monthly columns at the Business Intelligence Network, or having read one of my books on Master Data Management or Data Quality. I hope to share my experiences as well as experiences our consulting practice has had with our clients in a way that can help you improve your organization’s information utility.
And I am always looking for feedback – I hope that my entries will inspire readers to share their own thoughts and experiences as well!
Introduction: Building A Business Case For Data Quality
Building a business case for data quality is a waste of time. Nobody really cares. Improving data quality for quality’s sake is a waste of money. Sounds funny coming from a data quality specialist, someone who has spent the last decade preaching data profiling and data quality. But the fact is people from the business side do not care about data quality. What they care about is the impact poor data quality has on their line of business.
When you look at how the business measures itself (after you get past revenue and profit), the talk is about key performance indicators (KPI). What are some of the KPIs for a call center? You will hear about goals of reducing talk time. The business wants to lower costs. You will hear about goals of decreasing hold times. The business wants to improve the customer experience. (more…)
MDM-Embarking on CRM 2.0? Then You Know It’s All About The Data
Arguably the top lesson of CRM 1.0 was simply this—data matters. Though CRM 1.0 promised to deliver a 360-degree customer view, untold numbers of multimillion-dollar CRM systems fell short of expectations because they failed to address the incomplete, incorrect, inconsistent and duplicate data that proliferated across the enterprise.
Acquire & Retain Customers with Trusted & Complete Customer Data
Now companies are moving to CRM 2.0, in many cases to the cloud with salesforce.com or another software as a service (SaaS) provider. And this time, determined to get the data right, many businesses are looking to master data management (MDM) and data quality to generate a true 360-degree customer view. (more…)
Data Quality And MDM: Are You Ready For The Data Management Superstorm?
Do you remember the blizzard of ’93? I remember working at a client’s office in New York City when it hit, and I remember trying to get out of the city that afternoon (which in fact I did, but that’s for another blog). The Storm of the Century, also known as the ’93 Superstorm, or the great blizzard of 1993 was unique for its intensity, massive size and wide-reaching effect. In the United States, the storm was responsible for 300 deaths.
A superstorm forms when an area of low pressure and an area of high pressure collide. A superstorm is created from multiple storms converging into one giant storm as depicted in the photo below where two storms are converging.
MDM In Action: A New Demo On Customer Account & Channel Partner Management
One of the hottest areas of master data management (MDM) is using high quality master data to drive revenue by supporting sales and channel operations. Informatica customers have racked up some terrific successes using MDM to generate a single, reliable view of customer and account information—and here’s a key reason why.
Acquire & Retain Customers with Trusted & Complete Customer Data
With Informatica MDM and Informatica Data Quality, sales and channel personnel gain hands-on control of customer data, product data and channel partner data and the relationships between this data. Those customer-facing teams no longer need to spend most of their time hunting for information in the CRM system, SFA system, billing system, partner management and other systems and reconciling it in spreadsheets. And they don’t need to wait on IT to round up and deliver the data they need right away.
If you’re wondering how this works, check out our six-minute how-to demo on MDM for customer account and channel partner management. This new demo offers a practical, step-by-step walk-through of how a sales, marketing and channel operations personnel can evolve from trying to sort through the clutter of contradictory data from multiple systems to leveraging a single, actionable customer account data set that powers a 360-degree customer view in their CRM system so they can improve customer acquisition and retention.
Inaugural Gartner MDM Summit In London A Major Hit
Europe might have started a little later than the U.S. with master data management, but if the inaugural Gartner MDM Summit for EMEA is any indication, it’s catching up quickly. Well over 350 registrants attended the event in London in early February, with strong representation from the UK, France, the Netherlands and other EMEA countries. Gartner Research VP Andrew White called the event a “major hit,” and I have to agree. (more…)
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