The same challenge also applies to companies sharing the same building number with other companies and not to say when companies and households are in the same building. So this is a common party master data issue.

Address verification and geocoding is seen as important methods for achieving data quality improvement related to the top data quality pain all over being quality of party master data and aiming at getting a single customer view.

Multi-occupancy is a pain in the (you know) getting there.

My pain

I have had some personal experiences living at multi-occupancy addresses lately.

One and a half years ago I was living a painless life in single family house in a Copenhagen suburb.

Then I moved closer to downtown Copenhagen in a flat as mentioned in post Down the Street.     

The tradition in Denmark is to send letters and make deliveries and register master data with a common format of units within a building and having separate mailboxes with flat ID and names for each flat. I have received most of my post since then and got all deliveries I’m aware of.

Then I moved to London in a flat. Here the flats in my building have numbers. But the postman delivers the letters in one batch in the street door, and there are no names on the doorbells in front of the door.

So now I sense I don’t get many letters and today I had to order the same stuff trice from amazon.co.uk, because I haven’t received the first two packages despite of their state of the art online accessible package tracking systems that tells me that delivery was successful.    

Master data pains unresolved

Address reference data at building number level and related geocodes are becoming commonly available many places around these days.

But having reference data and real world aligned location and related party master data at the unit level is still a challenge most places. Therefore we are still struggling with using address verification and geocoding for single customer view where a given building number has more than a single occupancy.

One other data quality dimension I have been addressing lately is accessibility.

Data accessibility is a universal feature within information technology as recently emphasized in the big story about that the Spanish bank BBVA is to move +100,000 employees to the cloud (using Google Apps). The main driver for that is data accessibility.

The increasing adoption of cloud services will in my eyes contribute positively to solving many data quality issues through improved accessibility as discussed in the post Data Quality from the Cloud.

The fact that data is available and in principle accessible doesn’t however mean that the case is solved. The Achilles Heel is how to smoothly integrate accessible data into business processes, not at least how to integrate and present data from many different sources be that external and internal sources.

Data accessibility must be seen in conjunction with the other data quality dimensions. Fulfilling one dimension doesn’t make the day. Accessibility to data that isn’t satisfactory unique, complete, timely and accurate isn’t that much worth. Making data consistent across multiple sources isn’t a walkover. Securing data integrity between more and more accessible data will be paramount.

Metadata management is also closely related to data accessibility. The importance of a common understanding about what is in the accessible data can’t be overestimated.

My guess is that we will see data accessibility as an increasingly important data quality dimension in the years to follow.  

The product is called instant Data Quality (abbreviated as iDQ ™). I have briefly described the concept in an earlier post called instant Data Quality.

iDQ ™combines two concepts:

• Software as a Service
• Data as a Service

While most similar solutions are bundled with one specific data provider the iDQ ™ concept embraces a range data sources. The current scope is around customer master data where iDQ ™ may include Business-to-Business (B2B) directories, Business-to-Consumer (B2C) directories, real estate directories, Postal Address Files and even social media network data from external sources as well as internal master data at the same time all presented in a compact mash-up.

The product has already gained a substantial success in my home country Denmark leading to the formation of a company solely working with development and sales of iDQ ™.

The results iDQ ™ customers gains may seem simple but are the core advantages of better data quality most enterprises are looking for, like said by one of Denmark’s largest companies:

“For DONG Energy iDQ ™ is a simple and easy solution when searching for master data on individual customers. We have 1,000,000 individual customers. They typically relocate a few times during the time they are customers of us. We use iDQ ™ to find these customers so we can send the final accounts to the new address. iDQ ™ also provides better master data because here we have an opportunity to get names and addresses correctly spelled.

iDQ ™ saves time because we can search many databases at the time. Earlier we had to search several different databases before we found the right master data on the customer. “

Please find more testimonials (in Danish) here.

I hope to be able to link to testimonials in more languages in the future.

In my professional life as a data quality and master data management practitioner my 2011 to do list included these three main activities:

• Working with Multi-Domain Master Data Quality
• Exploiting rich external reference data sources in the cloud
• Doing downstream data cleansing

In a press release from May 2011 Gartner (the analyst firm) Highlights Three Trends That Will Shape the Master Data Management Market. These are:

• Growing Demand for Multidomain MDM Software
• Rising Adoption of MDM in the Cloud
• Increasing Links Between MDM and Social Networks

It looks like I was working in the right space for the first two things but stayed in the past regarding the third activity being downstream data cleansing.

The third thing to embrace in the future, social MDM we may call it, has been an area of interest for me the last couple of years and actually some downstream data cleansing projects has touched making master data useful for including social media networks in the loop.  

I’m not sure if 2012 will be a breakthrough for social MDM, but I think there will be some exciting opportunities out there for paving the road for social MDM.

Given the amount of these warnings all over makes me think that the message is: “Yes, we know that you may tilt and hurt yourself. Actually we don’t care and we don’t intend to do anything about it. But at least now you can’t say, that we didn’t warn you”.

It also makes me think about what is being done about poor data quality all over. There are lots of warnings out there and lots of ways and methodology available about how to measure bad data. But when it comes to actually doing something to solve the problems, well, warning signs seems to be the most preferred remedy.

I’m as guilty as anyone else I guess. I have even proposed a data quality immaturity model once.

Doing something about “wet floor” and “slippery ground” often have a short term workaround and a long term solution. And actually “wet floor” is often due to a recent cleaning action.

A common saying is: “Don’t Bring Me Problems—Bring Me Solutions!”.

Let’s try to put up fewer warning signs and work on having less slippery ground including immediately after a cleaning action.

During that process I have become a regular customer at the Gatwick Express, the (sometimes) fast train going from London’s second largest airport to central London.

When buying tickets online they require you to enter a billing address. Here you can choose between entering a UK address or an international address.

If you enter a UK address the site takes advantage of the UK postal code system where you just have to enter a postcode, which is very granular in the UK, and a house number, and then the system will know your address.

Alternatively you can choose to enter an international address. In that case you will get a form with more fields for you to enter. But, in order not to be too international the form still have the UK way of formatting an address.

Also the default country is United Kingdom which I guess is the only value that should not be applicable for this form.

Within information technology and not at least my focus areas being data quality and master data management there is a lot of exchange going on over the pond as European companies are using North American technology and sometimes vice versa. Also European companies are setting up operations in North America and of course also the other way around.

Some technologies works pretty much the same regardless of in which country it is deployed. A database manager product is an example of that kind of technology. Other pieces of software must be heavily localized. An ERP application belongs to that category. Data quality and master data management tools and implementation practice are indeed also subject to diversity considerations.

When North American companies go to Europe my gut feeling is that an overwhelming part of them chooses to start with a European or EMEA wide head quarter on the British Isles – and that again means mostly in the London area.

The reasons for that may be many. However I guess that the fact that people on the British Isles doesn’t speak a strange language has a lot to say. What many North American companies with a head quarter in London often has to realize then is, that this move only got them half way over the pond.  

Another angle in this context I have observed over and over again is the chance of a false negative if the name and other data are the same, but the birthday is different. In this case you may miss matching two records that are actually reflecting the same real world individual.

One should think that a datum like a birthday usually should be pretty accurate. My practical experience is that it in many cases isn’t.

Some examples:

Running against the time

Every fourth year when we have Olympic Games there is always controversies about if a tiny female athlete really is as old as said.

I have noticed the same phenomenon when I had the chance to match data about contesters from several years of subscription data at a large city marathon in order to identify “returning customers”.

I’m always looking for false positives in data matching and was really surprised when I found several examples of same name and contact data but a birthday been raised one year for each appearance at the marathon.

That’s not my birthday, this is my birthday

Swedish driving license numbers includes the birthday of the holder as the driving license number is the same as the all-purpose national ID that starts with the birthday.

In a database with both a birthday field and a driving license number field there where heaps of records with mismatch between those two fields.

This wasn’t usually discovered because this rule only applies to Swedish driving license numbers and the database also had registrations for a lot of other nationalities.  

When investigating the root cause of this there were as usual not a single explanation and the problem could be both that the birthday belonged to someone else and the driving license belonged to someone else.

Using both fields cut down the number of false negatives here.

Today’s date format is?

In the United States and a few other countries it’s custom to use the month-day-year format when typing a date. In most other places we have the correct sequence of either day-month-year or year-month-day.  Once I matched data concerning foreign seamen working on ships in the Danish merchant fleet. When tuning the match process I found great numbers of good matches when twisting the date formats for birthdays, as the same seaman was registered on different ships with different captains and at different ports around the world.

When adding the fact that many birthdays was typed as 1^st January of the known year of birth or 1^st day in the known month of birth a lot of false positives was saved.

The question about occupation in the merchant fleet was actually a political hot potato at that time and until then the parliament had discussed the matter based on wrong statistics.

PS

I have used birthday synonymously with “date of birth” which of course is a (meta) data quality problem.

A general characteristic of such organizations is that they have databases with as many “customers” as huge global enterprises; however the number of employee records is only a fraction compared to those large companies.

So the emphasis is often not at creating well manned data governance organizational structures but implementing the best automation available in order to have optimal party master data management, where the parties involved are members and other roles played by individuals and companies with a common interest.

Many nonprofit organizations have several different fundraising activities going on at the same time. This means that real world individuals, households, organizations and their contacts are registered through different channels. The challenges of getting a “single view of customer” from the data streams created in these processes are discussed in the post Multi-Purpose Data Quality.

There are many nonprofit organizations working internationally. The often decentralized management structures in nonprofit organizations means that way of doing things will naturally be different between countries where nonprofits are operating. Also the differences in legislation and culture are important. Some examples related to how to exploit master data are examined in the post Feasible Names and Addresses.

When it comes to creating business cases for data quality nonprofits are basically of course not different from any other organization. The main goals are increased fundraising and lowering administration costs. As said, the low number of employees often leads to using technology. The low amount of money available often leads to using agile technology.

What couldn’t be done yesterday at some place may be done today at your place.

Everyone knows that the bumblebee can’t fly. Except the bumblebee. So it does fly.

We all know that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.

Well, until that a recent experiment at CERN showed that something apparently did travel faster than the light as told in an article on Sky News this morning called Amazement as Speed of Light ‘Is Broken’.

So, don’t always say that data quality can’t be improved because of this and that. Maybe it really couldn’t be done yesterday but things have changed today.