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CDI, DataDelta Survey Dawns
DataDelta and CDI partner to produce a customer view accuracy survey.
By DAVID SIMS
TMCnet CRM Alert Columnist
DataDelta Inc. has partnered with market research firm The CDI Institute and is announcing the launch of the "Single Customer View Accuracy Survey" -- what they claim is the first Customer Data Integration industry survey to measure Single Customer View accuracy resulting from CDI projects.
"The ability to cut through complexity and provide an accurate view of the customer is one of the most important aspects of information management today," Janet Perna, general manager of IBM's Information Management division has said.
"Positive customer identification via record match accuracy is a critical, yet often error-prone, component of CDI," says Aaron Zornes, former META Executive VP and now Chief Research Officer of the CDI Institute.
Ed Allburn's the president and CEO of DataDelta, which company officials describe as "the CDI industry's first vendor-neutral tool to analyze and fine-tune CDI system accuracy." He says that while CDI has focused mainly on the mechanics of data integration, with less attention paid the accuracy of the actual results, "increasingly sophisticated users… are demanding increasingly accurate CDI results."
Stands to reason, in this reporter's estimation. "DataDelta works like an auto shop's analysis computer for fine-tuning car engines, but our tool is used to analyze and fine-tune the business rules for match engines," explained Allburn.
Philip Howard, Research Director at Bloor Research and author of "Data Quality: An Evaluation and Comparison" notes that with existing technologies most companies using CDI have to compromise between the accuracy of matching that they use -- "either they have to accept a number of false matches or they have to put up with too many duplicates," which sort of defeats the purpose.
DataDelta officials claim this is "the first survey of its kind," and they'll present results at the 17th Information Quality Conference hosted by Larry English and The International Association for Information and Data Quality, September 19-23 in Houston.
David Raab of Raab Associates, a marketing technology consultant and author of comparison guides for CRM and customer matching software, points out that the CDI accuracy problem may be much more widespread than previously realized. "The complex nature of optimizing record matching business rules means that most companies likely have serious problems with at least some of their data," Raab thinks.
In the February 2002 issue of BI Direct, Mike Healy notes that while in the past customers were more tolerant to business errors such as duplicate letters arising from erroneous customer data, nowadays there is far less room for error.
Healy recommends creating accuracy definitions and thresholds backed by business definitions, testing an initial load of customer data to the database and running a "mini rehearsal" of the data load with a data sample to see what levels of accuracy can be reached, among other steps, to clean customer data.
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David Sims is contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles by David Sims, please visit:
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