Monthly Archives: November 2008

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The obfuscated address contest

Published by Emil van den Berg on 23-11-2008 in Data Quality. 2 Comments Tags: , .

Programmers sometimes organize contests in writing code that is perfectly understandable for a compiler, but very difficult to understand for people.

When working on products for address standardisation, one can discover an interesting variant: people sometimes write – unintentionally, I suppose – addresses in such a way that they are rather understandable for people, but very difficult to process for computers.

Consider for example this street name:

Kerkchoosteeg hoogl

The official version is:

Hooglandsekerk-choorsteeg (‘high land church – choir alley’)

This street contains a couple of errors:

  • A hyphen is missing.
  • One ‘r’ is missing.
  • One word (‘Hooglandsekerk’) has been split up into two words.
  • The first word (‘Hooglandse’) is written at the end.
  • One word is abbreviated (‘hoogl’).

The first two errors are not very special, but the last three can only be discovered in common: it can only be discovered that the word ‘hooglandsekerk’ has been split up into two words, if at the same time it is understood that the left part has been abbreviated and moved to the end.
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ROI of Data Quality: Do you really need to know?

Published by Eddy Reimerink on 19-11-2008 in Data Governance, Data Quality and MDM for customer data. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

What ROI?

It must have been around 2002, that I was discussing the Return On Investment of Data Quality solutions with one of the founders of Human Inference, Norbert Mergen. While discussing the well known benefits: less return mail, more effective campaigns, reduction of debitor risk, single customer view, … I brought another subject at the table: isn’t it strange that we really do ROI calculations on such an obvious need? Did you ever create a fence in the garden and question the ROI of a hammer? We published on this matter in dutch back in 2002 in the CRM Marketing Centre and included the hammer discussion. And now, in 2008, it is so interesting to see that many people nowadays have put the same questions, reading the blog of Jack Vinson “Stop thinking ROI, think success!” Anyway, it may not convince your management, so you will still need to do the maths, but just bringing the subject to the table may help you getting your data quality project going.

ING: Customer Information is Power

Published by Admin on 19-11-2008 in Data Quality and MDM for customer data. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , .

ING

ING is looking to make more use of its customer data for behavioural targeting. The financial services company has seen a five-fold in customer contacts in the past few years (think of Internet banking). They also have a lot of information on each customer through they payment transactions they do. If the customer would allow ING to use this information the bank could analyst the energy, phone and other bill and deliver specific offers together with other companies.

The ING PR department rushed to tone-down the debate by saying that this is only a possible scenario. A flood of data privacy concerns would be connected to initiatives like these.

The ING idea is thought provoking. How much does you bank know about your and the companies you do business with? How would they be able to use this and could it be of benefit to you?

Data Quality in Outlook?

Published by Admin on 18-11-2008 in Data Quality. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

HIquality Contact Cleanse

Microsoft Outlook must be the most used CRM application in the world, be it on the desktop or on a smartphone. A common problem with Outlook contacts is that information is often incomplete, incorrect and not formatted correctly. Specifically telephone numbers are often formatted in such a way that it won’t be accepted by your mobile phone.

A new service launched by Human Inferences brings a remedy to this problem. The service called HIquality Contact Cleanse allowes users to simply email a vCard to contactcleanse@humaninference.com or transmit the contact from a Windows Smartphone using a downloadable application. The Contact Cleanse service then simply responds by email with the cleansed vCard as an attachment. Give it a try!

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Bashups – mashups for the business

Published by Winfried van Holland on 18-11-2008 in Data Quality, Data Quality on Demand and Data Services. 1 Comment Tags: .

Mashup

The business needs bashups. Step away from the techy and fancy mashups and mash now the technology and graphics for the business sake. Combining the whole razzmatazz of AJAX, REST and Web2.0, and sometimes completely loose the business.

Of course, it helps that your mashup visualizes your address immediately Google maps, but … did it also check for you if the person you entered above is still living there or if the telephone number is related to the address or even more to the person. We need to look through the eyes of the business to see the actual business step that needs to be executed and see how we can utilize the mashup to retrieve the right customer on the right place on the right time with the correct telephone number in the most effective way. That will help us to be more compelling than our competition.