Informatica Perspectives

I ended 2009 blogging with my 2010 predictions. Now that we're in 2010, I'll begin the new year with resolutions we can all make to move our organizations forward - to become information driven. My purpose is to provide quick anecdotes that are actionable so you can see immediate results.

1. Ask your IT applications manager to profile the customer data in two or three systems such as sales, marketing and your customer portal. Ask the IT person to quantify the quality of the information in each one. For example, how many duplicate contacts are there, how many customers are not ‘mailable' or ‘emailable', how many contacts are missing critical information for sales effectiveness. Once you have that information and know the quality of your data, you can accurately make the business case for what your bad data is costing you. This should result in helping secure the funding necessary to address these issues. [Read more]

"Beauty is only skin deep". This old saying came to mind recently when speaking with a friend. Jane was relaying to me the amount of time she spends correcting data for management reports every month. Answering simple questions like "how many new customers did we add?", "how many customers placed repeat orders?" or "what was the top selling product?" Without the correct answers, management ran the risk of making poor decisions on future investments in marketing campaign, capacity planning and sales and support resources.

On average Jane spent two days a month checking for duplicate customer names and standardising product codes and descriptions, just so the reports would give an accurate reflection of sales. All this was managed in multiple Excel worksheets. The reporting tool the company had invested in was still being supplemented with manual worksheets, as management did not trust the information from the tool of choice. As the months and quarters went by Jane spent more and more time managing the worksheets. [Read more]