Data integrators face many problems, but none is tougher to deal with than disparate data sources.
Companies often support between five and eight different database technologies, and 50 different sources of data from the operational side, according to Kevin Strange, vice president and research director at Gartner.
One reason is the Balkanization that occurs when departments jealously guard their own fiefdoms. But this can result in very real costs to the company, as it did with an insurer that offered both vehicle and home insurance.
According to Strange, the company had taken out a series of space ads, asking customers who held homeowners policies to call and get a special rate on auto insurance.
Of course, if that data had been available in a centralized location, the insurer could have made a series of outbound calls rather than relying on mass marketing.
“Data belongs to the enterprise, not to a specific project or department,” Strange said, adding that it's critical for companies to implement this thinking throughout their organization.
Other times data can be flat-out incorrect. For example, one firm discovered during an audit that Social Security numbers that it used to track customers were often wrong.
The reason? The company was paying a foreign firm to enter its data, and the bonus structure was based on the volume of records processed. As a result, keypunch operators were throwing in any numbers that happened to come into their heads, if not using the same number over and over, Strange said.
Assuming that data can be cleaned and verified, training users across an enterprise presents its own set of difficulties.
One common mistake is to bring in an outside consultant who cheerfully teaches hundreds of employees how to use a piece of reporting software, but never tells them how to analyze raw data.
Training isn't cheap, and the hidden costs can come as a surprise to organizations that want a plug-and-play system. And that's not the only budgetary variance they may face: Software licensing fees are the tip of an iceberg bobbing above the water level, Strange noted.
Finally, watch out what your call center employees do with unused data fields. Reps at a health insurance call center entered the code for hemorrhoids in a blank data field to denote customers who were a pain in the butt.
