Tag Archives: address
Data Governance and Technical Issues
In contrast to addressing the management and process issues, we might say that the technical issues are actually quite straightforward to address. In my original enumeration from a few posts back, I ordered the data issue categories in the reverse order of the complexity of their solution. Model and information architecture problems are the most challenging, because of the depth to which business applications are inherently dependent on their underlying models. Even simple changes require significant review to make sure that no expected capability is inadvertently broken. (more…)
Classifying Types of Data Management Issues
Coincidentally, my company is involved with a number of different customers who are reviewing the quality criteria associated with addresses. Each scenario has different motivations for assessing address data quality. One use case focuses on administrative management – ensuring that things that need to happen at a particular location have an accurate and valid address. A different use case considers one aspect of regulatory compliance regarding protection of private information (since mail delivered to the wrong address is a potential exposure of the private information contained within the envelope). Another compliance use case looks at timely delivery of hard copy notifications as part of a legal process, requiring the correct address. (more…)
Master Data Models, Inheritance, and Governance
In the recent series of posts I have been evolving the argument that we must take some degree of care in the development of master models so that we can walk the fine line between maintaining a unique view of entities without duplicating their characteristic attribute data. It boils down to this idea: if we know that an entity can take on multiple roles, what is our process for assigning characteristics to the core entity that are inherited by the representation of the entity within one of those roles, and which attributes are specific to the role itself? (more…)
Standardizing Your Address Quality
In my recent series of posts, I have been noodling on the differences between the concept of an “address,” which implies delivery, and “location,” which provides a much broader view of geographic points in space that have relevance to business or operational activities. In my last post, we looked at the characteristics of each of these concepts and some critical differences.
And to continue those thoughts, as opposed to the level of precision provided by location coordinates, there is lingering ambiguity associated with addresses. For example, with a residential address, we could be talking about any of these points:
- The location of the mail drop;
- The location of the front door;
- The location of the front of the driveway;
- The median point of the parcel frontage; or
- The center of the rooftop,
among other potential places. But, as my last set of posts was intended to highlight, there is great importance of high quality location information, and a good starting point is address standardization and cleansing. You need to be able to resolve known addresses into precise locations as well as map locations to their nearest addresses. Yet many organizations don’t have any handle on their own address standardization and cleansing strategy. It might be worth a quick scan and see how many different address cleansing tools are in place, how many people are assigned to manage those tools, and the many different sets of rules used in different business processes. Any replication of utility or functionality might be a sign that it is time to revisit that address cleansing strategy from an enterprise standpoint and standardize on one framework to reduce complexity and duplicative work.
(…) There You Are
In my last post, I introduced the notion that the persistence and/or use of location data as attribution is becoming ubiquitous. Whether we look at the stand-alone GPS devices that decorate the array of windshields across the parking lot or the capabilities typically embedded within our mobile telephones, precise location is, to some extent, overtaking the concept of “address.”
And perhaps there is some value to increasing the use of dimensional coordinates in lieu of an address. As I commented in my previous post, there are still many situations where errors or flaws in location information lead to business impacts. A common example involves marketing or sales mailings – incorrect delivery addresses increase costs when mailings or catalogs are sent to nondeliverable or incorrect addresses. (more…)