Data Strategy articles from March 2009

Data Strategy archives from March 2009

LEADER: Do you speak Polish?
March 25, 2009... If you go to the circus this evening, you might find that there are no clowns. It might also be missing its high wire act and possibly an elephant handler or two. A recent tightening of immigration laws has led to staff shortages in some...

O2 and E.ON to speak at The Data Summit.
March 25, 2009... The Data Summit, which takes place in Brussels from 2 - 4 June, will hear from leading figures in energy and telecommunications about how data is helping their organisations to succeed in turbulent times. They will be joined by speakers from...

Finance directors back loyalty schemes.
March 25, 2009... Four out of five finance directors in UK companies believe that their loyalty schemes will help the business emerge from recession with a significant competitive advantage. Medium-sized businesses remain the most sceptical, but large...

ICO acts against secret construction blacklist.
March 25, 2009... In a dramatic move against illegal use of personal data, the Information Commissioner's Office has raided a private investigations office and seized a database holding details of 3,231 construction workers. The data is believed to have been...

Charity takes heart from clean data.
March 25, 2009... The British Heart Foundation has undertaken a major consolidation of its supporter records which will see 2.5 million files from five different databases consolidated, converted and cleansed. The charity has appointed Occam to undertake the...

Prices crash for fraudulent card data.
March 25, 2009... The price of a card fraud identikit has collapsed from $15.00 18 months ago to around $2.00 last October and may now be as low as $1.00, according to Fortify Software. For that price, criminals can acquire a card number, start/expiry data,...

Controversial data sharing powers may be limited.
March 25, 2009... Justice Minister Jack Straw has indicated that he may reconsider wide- ranging powers to demand the sharing of personal information following concerted protest. The powers, contained in Clause 152 of the Coroners and Justice bill would have...

Click fraud tackled by Clash-Media.
March 25, 2009... Online lead generation specialist Clash-Media has launched a data quality module aimed at reducing the number of fraudulent and bogus consumer leads collected. The new module will apply identification and verification techniques to ensure that...

Orchestra Networks enables data modelling.
March 25, 2009... The latest version of Orchestra Networks' master data management solution, EBX.Platform 4.6, has been released with a new, fully integrated Data Model Assistant. This supports the collaboration and design of data models that reflect the...

Data management still only halfway there.
March 25, 2009... Data management in large companies is ineffective in the majority of cases, with only 47 per cent rating their efforts positively. The findings emerged in research carried out by Kalido among 123 respondents in organisations with turnover...

BEHIND THE NEWS: Pitney Bowes maps out business insight.
March 25, 2009... To many people, especially in marketing, Pitney Bowes is still most closely associated with mailing equipment and outsourced services. So the creation of a new business unit called Pitney Bowes Business Insight may have come as a surprise. ...

DATA GOVERNNANCE: Banks slow on data governance.
March 25, 2009... Data quality has assumed major levels of importance within the financial services industry as companies recognize that data is an asset. Yet this not being matched by the implementation of a data governance structure to support this quality....

LETTER: Designed with the user in mind.(Letter to the editor)
March 25, 2009... It's interesting that Andy Wood says in the feature "Get a better view" (January 2009) that marketing and the back-office don't mix when it comes to creating a single customer view (SCV). He's right - but it shouldn't be the case. The...

LETTER: Single view, single action.(Letter to the editor)
March 25, 2009... I read with interest your January feature on SCV. As Richard Dixon suggests, limited internal IT knowledge can be blamed for not achieving a single customer view. Together with the fact that attaining a SCV is costly, business objectives around...

OPINION: Analytics identifies green shoots.
March 25, 2009... A media furore met the suggestion by Labour's Business Minister, Baroness Vedera, that she can see "green shoots" in the economy. Many companies and politicians were quick to dismiss her thoughts. However, should we not all be looking...

OPINION: Have you joined the data crunch?
March 25, 2009... You have two potential customers. One who's never bought your product, so you know little about them. The other buys fairly regularly, so you know the products they like, how much they spend, how often they buy and therefore have a pretty...

LETTER: Reading "digital body language".(Letter to the editor)
March 25, 2009... I felt your feature, "Experience matters" (February 2009), provoked interesting debate as never before has it been more important that organisations understand the customer experience, and defining what this means. As John Ginn...

LETTER: Putting a value on data quality.(Letter to the editor)
March 25, 2009... At last, the world is waking up to the importance of data quality, with industry regulators and trade bodies starting to demand investment in management systems. As we sink further into recession, it is important to make the most of...

INTERNATIONAL LINE-UP: Data with latitude.
March 25, 2009... If you want to know about the difficulties of dealing with international data, just ask the Irish police. The Garda were puzzled by a single Polish driver who had run up 50 traffic offences at different addresses. One officer with some...

MASTER DATA MANAGEMENT REVIEW: Local data, global master.
March 25, 2009... "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." When George Orwell wrote those words in 1984, he can not have had in mind its relevance to master data management. Yet for many organisations,...

CASE STUDY: A chain reaction.
March 25, 2009... When a large European financial services company analysed its market penetration and channel satisfaction and found it was losing market share and the confidence of its sales and marketing channels, it had to look internally for a solution....

ONLINE DATA SERVICES: Cash for customers.
March 25, 2009... Do you have a copy of "The Loyalty Effect" by Frederick Reichheld on your bookshelf? Burn it. That could be your conclusion if you have recently been talking to anybody in the lead generation industry. One of the key assumptions...

CUSTOMER RETENTION REVIEW: Dusting data for fingerprints.(Company overview)
March 25, 2009... Unless your media footprint is zero, you will be aware that customer retention strategies are this year's big thing. Analysts, consultants and advisors all agree that keeping hold of what you have makes sound sense in turbulent times. ...

CASE STUDY: Food for thought.
March 25, 2009... Background Wiltshire Farm Foods (WFF) is the direct-to-consumer brand of apetito; one of Europe's leading suppliers of quality frozen food and catering solutions. The company provides delicious, high quality frozen meals direct to the...

DATA QUALITY REVIEW: Upstream data blocks that flood the downstream.(Company overview)
March 25, 2009... When data quality gets discussed, it is usually in the context of its impact on local operations, such as lists for direct mail, email or telemarketing. Errors and duplicates reduce performance of campaigns and create waste. Upstream from...

DATA FINANCIALS: Analytics gap revealed in Alterian survey.
March 25, 2009... Nearly half of marketers may be making use of analytics, but one quarter of them say it is the most difficult part of running a campaign. And just under one in ten say that analytical applications are the tool they use the most, revealing a...