Customer Data Disorder – a great opportunity to improve business performance!

Cure customer data disorder™

Information about parties (people and legal entities) large enterprises do business with is frequently incomplete and inaccurate. Questions like - "How many customers do we have?" are often difficult to answer. Poor quality party data negatively impacts business performance across function. It masks a true understanding of risk and profitability. It impacts the effectiveness of marketing and sales. It hampers the productivity of service. It results in conflicting reports and makes it more difficult to comply with legal requirements and regulations. "Improving data quality/information integrity" was the most pervasive technology concern cited by 58% of the 653 respondents to a recent CSC/FEI/FERF¹ survey.

"Parties" are the people and legal entities you do business with

Parties are people and legal entities that enter into contracts for goods and services; person parties and business parties. Parties are often referred to by the type of relationship they have to a business account, such as "owner" of a financial account, "subscriber" to a telecommunication service or "member" of a healthcare plan. Parties also have important relationships to other parties in three relationship types; person to person, person to business and business to business. Examples are "individuals in a household", "contacts in a business organization", "doctors in a medical practice" and "establishments in a legal entity".

Customer data disorder is the conflict between the characteristics of parties in the real world and the information you have about them

In information technology terms there is the "entity in the real world" and the "information about the entity in the world" stored in databases and managed by business applications. Party is the entity itself in the real world. Parties are individuals, groups of people and legal entities. Party data is the information entity that contains information about the party entity in the real world. According to IDC² the average company has 49 applications that operate on 14 different customer databases and, on average, no more than 20% of customer data resides in a single location. Very often there’s a different meaning for party within a business based on function every place there’s party data. Different business definitions, different logical models, different application logic, different data values and keys that cannot be easily reconciled across sources. On top of that people and businesses in the real world change constantly. And then of course the speed of business and the number of contact channels used continues to accelerate and expand. No wonder "single view of customer" continues to come out on top in various surveys around information management business requirements and challenges. Customer data disorder is the serious business condition that arises from a deep miss-alignment between the parties you do business with and the information you have about them across the enterprise.

¹ Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), Financial Executives International (FEI) and the Financial Executives Research Foundation (FERF). "Ninth Annual Assessment of the Information Technology (IT) Practices, Priorities and Problems that Confront Today's Senior Financial Leaders," July 2007.

² John F. Gantz. "The Expanding Digital Universe: A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth through 2010," IDC, March 2007.

Customer Data Disorder – a great opportunity to improve business performance!

Party Information Comes in Layers

DataQualityFirst™, PartyQualityInsight™ and Cure Customer Data Disorder™ are trademarks of DataQualityFirst Inc. IBM®, Information Server®, InfoSphere™, QualityStage® and DataStage® are trademarks of the International Business Machines Corporation. Other company, product or service names may be trademarks or service marks of others.

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