Party data quality in the enterprise

Where in your organization can you identify real sponsorship along the lines of "single view of customer"? In many organizations the CEO recognizes the strategic imperative to change the organization’s center of gravity from account to customer. Executive sponsorship is a must have for the funding, business ownership and governance necessary for success.

Focusing on the party datasets themselves offers a very concrete roadmap for diagnosis and often surfaces the information necessary to gain executive sponsorship. Just start with a "simple" question like how many places are there where we store information about the people and legal entities we do business with? Focus on a handful of sources and then for each party dataset diagnose the current state.

• Look for formal mechanisms to gauge or report on the quality of the data or record linkage process.
• Interview the people who use the data and find out whether they think it’s "fit for use" and possesses the desired features.
• Identify where the standardization and matching logic is actually executed and determine the degree to which the logic is exposed and configurable.
• Take a look at the business process responsible for managing the party data and confirm the formal definition of "customer", customer relationships and hierarchies.
• Look into how the data is formally managed for create, read, update and delete and the logical model that is supposed to be enforced.
• Identify processes to handle exceptions and established methodologies and process for governance.

Knowledge about the quality and content of party data combined with the data services to cleanse and link party records are used to implement improvements.

• Load and maintain the quality of the party dimension in the warehouse, clean up the data in the CRM system, load the new ERP application and improve the enrichment process for external data.
• Improve business logic that standardizes party data attributes and links party records in the application, in the database or in the messaging environment. Consider deploying that logic as "always on" data services in a loosely coupled architecture.
• Distribute the ability to filter, combine and compare party datasets to the business so insight about who you do business with is used to improve business performance.