The Importance of Data Integrity – Additional Thoughts

I have thought more about the importance of data integrity in a CRM implementation.  Here are my additional thoughts:

• Data cleansing tools, such as the Business Objects products, cleanse, standardize, and consolidate customer-centric data anywhere that data is touched, stored, or moved. The tool helps to consolidate multiple identities of the same customer across several legacy systems data sources to create a single customer view.
• Data-cleansing tools can be integrated into an enterprise application architecture. Several data-cleansing tool vendors already have APIs developed for CRM and ERP [applications. Depending on the company’s enterprise technical architecture, these APIs should be relatively easy to implement. The data-cleansing tools follow business rules that proactively maintain data quality.
• An ongoing plan to maintain data cleanliness and integrity (parsing, correcting, and matching data) can help prevent data degradation over time.
• Quality data can help deliver more accurate reports to customer-facing personnel and customers.
• Costs (associated with poor data quality) can sometimes be reduced, including redundancy costs (storing same data in more than one database) and infrastructure costs (costs of hardware used for data storage).

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