However, the manner in which these changes take place should be structured. Otherwise the most recent change to a particular contact will always prevail in the database - regardless of whether that change was accurate. This could add an element of chaos to a database that should be orderly and structured. Not all contacts should be blindly updated, not all users are careful about their changes and not all changes are desired.
Furthermore, some changes are more destructive than others and should be more tightly controlled, while other changes are harmless and only serve to enhance the firm's relationship intelligence. Adding a middle name to a contact at a prospective company only serves to enhance the quality of a contact and has no negative side-effects. However, changing a client's company name is highly suspect and should be approved before making the change.
Distinguishing between important contacts and destructive changes is necessary to allow firms to apply the most optimal amount of resources to protect the most critical data.
SIDEBAR: Fight Dirty Data
In a 2001 report focused on organisations that had implemented data warehouses for the purpose of business intelligence, Cutter Consortium identified the following causes of dirty data.
- Poor data entry, which includes misspellings, typos and transpositions, and variations in spelling or naming.
- Data missing from database fields.
- Lack of company-wide or industry-wide data coding standards (a big problem in health care, for example).
- Multiple databases scattered throughout different departments or organisations, with the data in each structured according to the idiosyncratic rules of that particular database.
- Older systems that contain poorly documented or obsolete data.
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