It Solutions

5 Data Quality Management Challenges

by

Victor Holman

In just about every field of work, there are quality measures in place to ensure customer satisfaction and product/service effectiveness. Manufacturing companies rely on quality control processes to minimize defects and reworks. Consultants measure the quality of their services to ensure repeat business. Journalist rely on quality information and leads to maintain integrity and credibility. But when it comes to corporate data, many organizations fail to understand the significance and drawbacks of unreliable or inconsistent data. This article discusses five quality challenges many organizations face and ways they can be more proactive in managing data.

Among the primary reasons for inconsistent or unusable data are:

* bad data from human data-entry error

* poorly-structured process

* lack of data standards across functional units or divisions

Ensuring the quality of data can become extremely difficult when you attempt to integrate data from across multiple sources. Before your organization begins a data-driven initiative it is important that you address issues of data quality within your existing data sources. Aside from the complexity of the actual process of ensuring the quality of your data, below are five challenges you may face when beginning this initiative:

* Data ownership

* Non standard data requirements

* Choosing the Right Data Management Tools

* Placing Responsibility for the Quality of Data on the IT Department

* Reactive vs. Proactive Mentality

Data Ownership

Data ownership, especially on the enterprise level, is a very complicated transition, and can contribute to significant pushback within an organization. Often the business unit managers or technicians entrusted with the implementation of an application assume ownership of the information used within that system. This introduces potential conflicts when these individuals must participate in enterprise-wide data initiatives and expose the internals of their information management to data quality audits and reviews.

Non Standard Data Requirements

Traditionally data management is structured where the business unit’s management chain has authority over the information used within the business unit, and each business unit has its own requirements for quality of data. Once data management progresses toward an enterprise-wide set of standards, there is often push back or hesitation by the business unit managers to invest time and resources in addressing issues that were not relevant at the business unit level.

Choosing the Right Data Management Tools

A frequent response by organizations with respect to building a data quality management program is to immediately begin to research the purchase of automated data cleansing or profiling tools. While some data quality tools do provide some benefit right out of the box, without a well-defined understanding of the types and scope of specific quality problems, and without a management plan for addressing discovered problems, buying a tool will not have a significant return on investment in achieving long-term strategic goals.

Placing Responsibility for the Quality of Data on the IT Department

Business units often assume that any issues regarding the quality of data are IT issues, and should be addressed by the technical teams. However, the business rules associated with running the business is best managed by the business client?

Reactive vs. Proactive Mentality

Most data quality programs are designed to react to data quality events instead of determining how to prevent problems from occurring in the first place. A mature data quality program determines where the risks are, what the objective metrics are for determining levels and impact of data quality compliance, and approaches to ensure high levels of quality.

Ways your organization can be more proactive towards data quality management:

* Ask for data quality performance measures as part of your business requirements gathering and prioritizing process.

* Determine, along with the business, how you are going to handle data quality issues both during the development process and when your processes are operational.

* Monitor data quality at every stage where data is touched

* Create a data quality management dashboard to monitor the agreed upon data quality performance measures.

About Victor Holman

Victor Holman is a performance management expert who provides fast, simple and inexpensive ways to transform organizational performance Check out the

FREE Performance Management Kit

and learn the secrets of high performing organizations. Learn all about performance management at

The Performance Portal

.

Article Source:

5 Data Quality Management Challenges

Media Segmentation and the Rise of Direct Marketing

by

Roberto Bell

Marketing academics have noted increasing media fragmentation. In recent years, the role of advertising and promotion in the overall marketing process has changed considerably. The audiences that marketers seek, along with the media and methods for reaching them, have become increasingly segmented. Advertising and promotional tactics have become more regionalised and targeted to specific audiences.

The extraordinary expansion of media options to reach specific markets has been fully documented. Along with the proliferation of products and services and the segmentation of types of prospects has come an extraordinary proliferation of media. There are new kinds of media, new developments in the traditional media, and new uses for media. Increasingly, the new media are tools for targeting rather than for saturating the mass market.

Information and the role of the customer database

In the information age marketers are not only focusing on analysis, but also understand the value of information collection.

In the past, direct marketing has been distinguishable from other marketing disciplines because of its emphasis on initiating a direct relationship between a buyer and a seller, a relationship that until recently centered primarily on the exchange of goods and services. However, in today’s market, exchanging information is becoming almost as important as exchanging goods and services. With rising costs, crowded supermarket shelves, and overstuffed mailboxes, smart marketers are not just efficiently consummating a sale, they are also providing a chance for customers to interact with them.

Of all these changes surely the most revolutionary is the ability to store in the computer information about your prime prospects and customers and, in effect, create a database that becomes your private marketplace. As the cost of accumulating and accessing the data drops, the ability to talk directly to your prospects and clients — and to build one-to-one relationships with them will continue to grow.

The new marketing environment

The effects on consumers of overwhelming change and the acceleration of change in our time have been brilliantly documented by Hugh Mackay in Reinventing Australia: So apparent is our national malaise that it has become fashionable to talk about the Age of Anxiety.

For people given to applying labels to decades, the 1980s was popularly described as “The Anxious Eighties” and there is no doubt that the decade lived up to the promise of that rather anxious label. Australia has not been alone in all this. All around the Western world, social commentators have been impressed by the rising level of anxiety over the past 20 years.

The mind and mood of consumers in the 2000s provide interesting challenges.

The growing number of consumer segments and the simultaneous increase in available products have made marketing much harder. Manufacturers are in a quandary about what to produce; retail merchandise buyers are overwhelmed by the task of product selection; and advertisers feel swamped trying to convey appropriate messages to so many market segments about so many products …companies are grappling with the fact that mass advertising campaigns have become less and less effective in reaching diverse groups of consumers.

Marketers must now fight to establish the relevance of their products in an extremely fractured marketplace. The marketing future will undoubtedly look different in another respect as well: customer information technologies will change the relative roles of retailers, manufacturers, and media companies.

Retailers have a natural advantage because they can directly measure customer behaviour and get first crack at the broadest range of information. Indeed, point-of-sale scanning systems have already played a significant role in shifting power from manufacturers to retailers.

Most important, the balance of power between large and small companies will change. As customer information technology becomes more prevalent, only those companies that can invest the resources and show technological leadership will succeed.

If you’re looking for a

Brisbane Marketing Consultant

contact Search Tempo Pty Ltd. For a

Brisbane SEO training

contact John Hacking.

Article Source:

Media Segmentation and the Rise of Direct Marketing

By Sharon Bell

A woman will have to endure menopause at some point in her life. At this stage, there are a lot of changes going on inside her body; but more than the physical transformations, her emotional and psychological changes can bring about frustrations and crushing difficulties. And when that happens, her relationship with her husband may suffer.

As a husband, you should be considerate enough to understand and support your wife during this crucial stage in her life. For many men, menopause can be viewed as a one-way street where the wife should get all the sympathy and tolerance. But for someone who really loves his wife and values his family, such selfish mindset should be nothing more than a hallucination.

Just think about it, would you rather be the one suffering menopausal symptoms? Can you handle the mood swings, the hot flashes? How about vaginal or, in your case, testicular dryness, if there is such a thing? Of course, your answer will be a big NO!

So the best thing that you can do for your wife during her menopausal stage is to help her get through it. In fact, that is the only thing that she is asking from you. Your wife’s menopausal phase is the true test of how much you care for her all these years; so you might as well learn how to give her the helping hand and the moral support that she needs.

Learn About Menopause

If your forty-year-old menopausal wife suddenly yells at you, would you yell back at her? Not if you know that being a little bit hostile is one of the symptoms of menopause. The point is that if you invest a little of your time in learning about menopause, the better it is for you to handle difficult situations linked to its symptoms.

In short, you will have an open mind about menopause, which is the beginning of gaining an understanding about the things that your wife is going through. You can easily learn about menopause and its symptoms by browsing the Net, consulting your doctor, or even asking your own mom.

Talk Things Over

After your brain had its fill of all the vital information about menopause, the next step to take is to talk things over with your wife. Open communication is the best path to take during these challenging times. It is useless if you have suddenly become an expert on menopause but you have no idea about how she feels at this stage.

So go on, talk with your wife. There is a big chance that all that she needs to endure menopause is a person she can talk to, without inhibitions, about the things that are going on inside her. And the best candidate for that job is you, her husband.

Brighten Up Her Days

Not all signs of menopause can be experienced by any woman; but if there is one big symptom that most, if not all menopausal women will have to go through, that is going to be depression. Experts say, this feeling of despair is caused by the fact that menopause has just ended a woman’s ability to bear children. And all the weight gain and loss of sex drive are also not helping her feel inspired.

During menopause, it is important that you give your wife all the reassurance that you still love her and that she is still the most beautiful woman in your life. Making her feel important, that she still occupies a vital part of your family, can surely ease her menopausal sufferings.

In the end, always remember that your wife did not ask to experience menopause. Nature is the one at fault here. But instead of making things worse for your wife, you can give her all the support that she needs.

About the Author: Sharon Bell is an avid health and fitness enthusiast and published author. Many of her insightful articles can be found at the premiere online news magazine

healthnfitnesszone.com

.

Source:

isnare.com

Permanent Link:

isnare.com/?aid=218705&ca=Relationships

By Douglas R. Williams

If you want to make a 65th birthday party more enjoyable, make a unique concept which the celebrant will like, arrange a musical lineup made up of the celebrant’s favorite songs, create an audio-visual demonstration that can be played throughout the celebration, create a scrapbook for the party attendees to write on, and create a tribute section.

Throwing an event is one of the best 65th birthday gifts you can provide to someone who has been endowed with 65 fruitful years. And there a variety of stuff you can explore to make the affair more memorable, interesting as well as special. Below are some tips you could do for the bday bash:

Think of a unique concept which the celebrant will love

Connect everything regarding the party with a distinctive concept. Ensure that the theme is a thing that the celebrant will enjoy or will revive fond reminiscences of his or her birthday celebration. The very first thing you can perform is to start out with a colour structure maybe applying the celebrant’s favorite color. And then you can imagine theme elements that you may build around that theme. One more fantastic idea will be to come up with a ‘period theme’ recreating the decade when the celebrant was born. For instance, if you need to recreate the nineteen fifties, visualize events, news, songs as well as movies that were well known throughout that moment and combine them for the occasion concept.

Schedule a musical lineup consists of the celebrant’s favourite songs

Discover what genre of music the celebrant likes listening to and if he or she is an enthusiast of a certain artist. Some individuals hire bands and also artists to perform throughout the occasion. If this is the case for the celebration you are organizing, be sure to provide them with a lineup of the celebrant’s favourite music. If you’ll not be having a band, you can simply down load the birthday boy or girl’s faves and play them during the special event. An additional wonderful idea for the songs will be to play songs which were well-known through the celebrant’s life-time.

Create an audio-visual presentation that could be played through the occasion

Collect images of the celebrant over the years. Inquire his relatives and buddies to provide a photo that they have. Check out all these and make an audio-visual display. Utilize the celebrant’s favorite tunes as the background music. Request family and friends to write a birthday message for the celebrant and incorporate these in the presentation. You may rent an LCD projector and play the demonstration throughout the occasion.

Make a scrapbook for the event visitors to write on

Provide the celebrant a heartwarming keepsake from the event by making a scrapbook which visitors could write on. Get several photos of the birthday boy or girl and fill the scrapbook using these. Decorate the scrapbook using stickers or perhaps pretty embellishments. Pass the scrapbook around to the friends during the party so they can write their well wishes and hello to the celebrant on it.

Organize a tribute part

Throughout the celebrant’s lifetime, she or he might have been an inspiration and also friend to other individuals. The party will be a fantastic chance to let those individuals show their love and also appreciation. Incorporate a tribute part throughout the party where all of the attendees can stand up and also honour the celebrant with a bday wish. They could also present the bday boy or girl with a gift item and share the meaning behind the object.

There are several approaches to make a 65th birthday party more meaningful. Be creative when you make plans and be sure to ask for suggestions from the celebrant’s family and friends.

About the Author: Written by Douglas R. Williams. For more suggestions on what 65th birthday gifts you could offer, check out http://www.lifeonrecord.com/Meaningful/Birthday/Gift/65th/Meaningful-65th-Birthday-Gift.htm

Source: isnare.com

Permanent Link: isnare.com/?aid=894333&ca=Advice