Data Quality Matters

This week I want to single out a great blog that I believe should be daily reading for expansion stage companies’ IT professionals: OCDQ or Obsessive-Compulsive Data Quality.

I found this blog while searching online for experts’ tips and tricks when it comes to managing large databases of prospects, which are very common at our portfolio companies. Regardless of the implementation of the database, we often have very common issues with those set of data as it grows with the company: duplication, data staleness, data corruption due to users errors, cumbersome database backup process. Especially, at our portfolio companies, data often grow at geometric pace due to the company’s rapid growth and these issues are compounded if their root causes are not resolved.

Moreover, intensive, high volume data usage has become so pervasive that every department in a company would own and manage some data repository of their own. These can be CRM database used by sales, the support knowledgebase used by customer services, web analytics logs accessed by marketing and so on. The net result is that we no longer have a single owner, manager or steward of data at the company.

At the same time, good data quality is the cornerstone of effective business processes, including sales and marketing, product and development and business development. For example, good prospect data is essential to the success of lead generation systems. With the rise of inbound marketing, data deduplication and records cleansing become vastly more challenging, as precious inbound leads needs to be properly scored and prioritized even with an imperfect set of data fields.

If only data management can be so simple as “A, B, C and D”, like in this “Data Quality Microwave”, courtesy of OCDQ blog again.

In the next blog, I will talk about web applications and data sources that can be useful for sales and marketing supporting at expansion stage software companies.