Liliendahl on Data Quality

This coming Sunday I have worked professionally within Information Technology for 30 years. As I will be on a (well deserved!) vacation in Andalusia on Sunday, I’ll better post my thoughts today.

I have had a lot of different positions and worked in a lot of different domains. The single subject I have worked with the most is business directories.

My first job was at the Danish Tax Authorities and one of the assignments was being a secretary to the committee working for a joint registration of companies in Denmark. Besides I learned a lot about working in political driven organizations and about aligning business and technology I feel good about having been part of the start of building a public sector master data directory. Such directories are both essential for an effective public administration and can be used as external reference data in private enterprises as a valuable mean to improve data quality with business partner master data.

Later I have been working a lot with improving data quality through matching solutions around business directories. This goes from the Dun & Bradstreet WorldBase holding nearly 170 million business entities from all over the world, over databases like the EuroContactPool to national databases either holding all businesses (available) in a single country or given industry segments.

I guess I also will be spending some additional years from now with integrating business directory information into business processes as smooth as possible and preferable along with a range of other kind of external reference data.

One of the new sources building up in the cloud in the realm of business directories is master data references in social networks. The LinkedIn Companies feature is a prominent example. Of course such directories have some data quality issues. This is seen in looking at the companies where I currently work:

• DM Partner A/S seems OK
• Omikron Data Quality has 90 employees according to the company profile (filled out by yours truly). Then it’s strange that there are only 25 profiles in the network. But that’s because most employees are in Germany where the competing network called Xing is stronger.
• Trapeze Group Europe has not been updated with a recent merger and not all profiles has changed their profile accordingly yet. But I’m sure that will be done as time goes by.

I have no doubt though that including information from social networks will become a part of integrating business partner master data in my future.