What’s the Data Quality Business Message?
By Robert Barker, Infoglide Senior VP & Chief Marketing Officer
What’s it going to take to move the data quality space forward in the future? That’s the question recently addressed by Ted Friedman of Gartner as reported in an article in destinationCRM.com. He suggests that the real answer may be messaging.
“Vendors have done a reasonably poor job in that they could get better at articulating the true business value [of data quality solutions],” he says. The Gartner analyst notes that vendors tend to talk about functionality in terms of technological advances, rather than conveying how that technology actually supports the business infrastructure. Friedman also notes that, in general, vendors could get better at articulating how tools support initiatives such as information governance and regulatory compliance — two notable industry trends.
Ted is right that to call out vendors to improve our messaging. At Identity Resolution Daily, we get down into technical details fairly often. For example, our bloggers have talked about data matching, its relationship to identity resolution, critical requirements for identity resolution, and we’ve had a series on data quality. Professor John Talburt of UALR’s Center for Advanced Research in Entity Resolution and Information Quality (ERIQ) is a regular contributor who talks about technical definitions and issues surrounding these topic areas.
That’s not to say that business issues around entity resolution and information quality have been ignored. Real world problems like lottery retailer fraud have been a frequent topic, as has organized retail crime. Another business problem we’ve talked about is employers trying to cheat workers compensation laws, and we’ve actually discussed regulatory compliance (OK, so we did get a bit technical on that one).
A huge issue related to information governance is preserving the rights of individual privacy. Because of our involvement in TSA’s Secure Flight program, we’ve written about this issue repeatedly since Identity Resolution was created. A recent post captures the essence of the issue.
So at best, I’d have to say we get a C+ or a B- on our messaging. With our upcoming release of IRE 2.2, we’ll make every effort to respond to Ted’s constructive criticism of the data quality space.
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July 9th, 2009 at 6:39 am
Hi Robert
I would have to agree with Ted but I think “reasonably poor” is a little gracious!
I think that part of the problem is that historically, the data quality technology companies employed a lot of very technically minded people who lacked the specific vertical experience that so many businesses need.
What I am definitely seeing in recent months is a much sharper focus on business products which don’t really have a great deal of focus on DQ but underneath the covers is the same old DQ engine. A couple of vendors are doing this well but the vast majority are just pushing the tired old messages.
There has been tons of online research for example which demonstrates that if your message is focused on you (the company) and not you (the customer) the engagement can be lost, literally in seconds.
Looking forward to your new messaging, why not use your community here to help you shape it?