Every company's data quality problems are unique, and not every company can expect to achieve 100 per cent data accuracy, all of the time. Indeed for some companies, achieving 100 per cent accuracy of data will never be a realistic aspiration and instead the talk is of finding the right trade-off between pragmatism and the ideal world.
Take the Queensland Retail Traders & Shopkeepers Association (QRTSA), which deputy director Randall Swayne describes as "basically a union for employers".
The QRTSA has moved from an expensive American-packaged membership solution to a much more simple tailored Access-based system developed for it by Queensland-based Data Quality Control. "Obviously with a membership-based organisation our membership is our lifeblood. If we don't have correct data, if [statements are] not going to the right people when we send them out, then we don't get our money," Swayne says. "So that is certainly a big issue."
The association relies on a couple of mini programs to check the veracity of the data: it is implementing a barcode generator called Postman to verify postal addresses, and surveys about 20 per cent of members every year to ensure the individual data is up to date. But while Swayne says he believes the data is now between 97 and 98 per cent accurate, getting those accuracy rates any higher would take more time and resources than it is worth.
"I guess the main issue that we've had with this in particular is to ensure that with such a large number of records - with huge numbers of retailers throughout Queensland, throughout Australia in fact - that we were getting as much detail as we possibly could and getting it through the system so that it was easy to manage, easy to read, and so on," Swayne says. "The other issue is we have a number of group members, like all the IGA stores, so we get a list direct from their head office. That data is assumed to be 100 per cent correct. It is not always, but it is as good as we can get without going through and checking every individual detail.
"We're constantly updating. Any time we get a new phone number or a new address we update. We've got about 1200 out of our 3000 [members] on e-mail, so we send them e-mails quite regularly saying: 'If your details have changed let us know.' "We send out a monthly magazine, so we know fairly quickly if that doesn't get to them, and we can chase that up - we're constantly doing that. To the 10,000 prospects we send out a newsletter, and again when those come back, we chase the people up and delete them if they have disappeared, or update their [details in the] system. We [also] survey our members, generally about 20 per cent every year just to be sure that their data is up to date. Obviously with a database like the one we've got it's very simple to do that in real time and change things as they occur.
"But [if we had to make sure all the data was 100 per cent accurate] we'd spend six months out of every year doing it," Swayne says.
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