. . . and the People
Data quality is, above all, a people issue. George Kahkedjian, CIO for Eastern Connecticut State University in the US, says most organisations do not even analyse their data to make sure it is correct. He also says awareness and training are even more critical to maintaining good data quality than technical analyses. In most organisations, says Kahkedjian, data collection is placed with individuals on low wages so training those individuals is not a high priority. Further, most employees do not distinguish the value of the data.
Delprado agrees data quality is as much or more a people issue than a technological one. In his view, de-duplicating data does not fully work, leading to no more than 99 per cent accuracy and requiring constant effort. That means the only way to get your data as accurate as possible is to have a sense of the importance of accurate customer data embedded into the organisational culture.
"The real way to fix it is [to ensure] that you only have one database, and whenever your organisation touches a customer it is written to the one copy. Then, if you see that there's two Delprados there, you ask the question: 'Do you want these linked? Is it the same person, is it not the same person?'
"[To instill that culture] we constantly have sessions with the staff," Delprado says. "We have a number of forums for internal communication about our strategy. Our strategy is very heavily focused on the intermediary and the relationship that we have with them and making sure that we satisfy their needs, which is satisfying their customers' needs. It is a matter of constant communication and [having] a consistent story. It's ensuring that the staff share the vision and the strategies that we've got. You can't do enough talking to them about it. I would be reasonably comfortable that most of our staff understand our strategy of intermediary-based and therefore we honour the relationships there.
"A lot of the companies are looking at data from a marketing perspective to cross-sell, but it's not a necessary focus from our perspective. We are honouring the relationship that we have with our intermediaries.
Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.