Data Quality

by Curt Hall

I've been seeing a lot of reports to the effect that "bad data" is negatively impacting many corporate customer relationship management (CRM) initiatives. That "bad data" should suddenly be causing CRM efforts to fail seems somewhat surprising, since it is not as if the problem arose only yesterday. Data warehouse proponents have been harping practically nonstop for years about the need for companies to implement data quality efforts. This alone makes me wonder if these companies reporting data quality problems with their CRM efforts have implemented a data warehouse, or are attempting to perform CRM without using a data warehouse to integrate their disparate customer information sources. But that's a good question for a survey on CRM, which we'll have to address another day. In this Advisor, we'll examine the problem of dirty data and what can be done to arrest it.