Here’s a pretty typical scenario that makes end users feel like they’re wasting time, and also creates a ton of waste and kills targeted business outcomes:

Some relational information is added to your business systems and no one notices the relationships. This could be different people in the same household or at the same company, it could be the same person or company with different details, or maybe it’s product or address information.

If the information were ‘exactly the same’ your business systems would probably identify this for you and either update the original record or create some relational indexing key. New information would be ‘linked’ to existing information.

But because the information isn’t exactly the same, it’s often treated as new information, which means different things depending on the context, but it essentially means you have fragmented and/or ‘duplicate’ information.

For an end user of any system this can mean multiple searches in one or even multiple systems, trying to find the right information, and trying to see the full picture.

This could be a customer.

This could be an employee.

Or it could be your CEO.

This could be a doctor, a patient, a paramedic, or a law enforcement officer responding to a call.

This is one of the more common reasons we talk about data quality. This is one of the more common reasons we cannot easily compare information from one system to another system, and this is also one of the more common reasons we replace business systems.

More importantly, this is also one of the more common reasons why operational costs will continue to increase for companies that are less ‘data literate’, why customers churn, why employees get burnt out, and why strategic initiatives fail to deliver their targeted business benefits.

There are millions of different ways that this can happen and we can’t expect perfection but we can do a lot better than we have done historically, by simply understanding the issues and being more proactive.

Senzing developed a world-class Entity Resolution AI that solves most of these problems in real-time, out-of-the-box. It’s self-tuning and self-correcting.

Match Data Pro is an easier way to clean, match, merge, and manage data. Anyone can do it. We’ve partnered with Senzing to make it very simple for business people to solve these problems, with a few minutes of their time and just a few clicks of the mouse.

Start a free account at matchdatapro.com.

Author: Ben Cutler

Inquiries: bcutler@matchdatapro.com