2009 Year in Review
As we’re about to enter 2010, it’s a good time to reflect on what happened in 2009 and what it all means.
“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times…” So Dickens begins “A Tale of Two Cities”, but it’s also a good description of the past year.
The first half of the year was one of the most challenging I’ve faced in my twenty-three year career in business and technology. The second half of 2009 was better – not without its speed bumps but every month was a little better than the one before it.
The macro-economic climate has been tumultuous at best. But the second half of the year showed enough improvement that Hub Designs’ revenue for the year was up 33%. Not bad for a two and a half year old company during the worst economic conditions in 80 years …
Marketing and Thought Leadership
We launched a new web site in January, and it’s been well received. Total visits to www.hubdesigns.com were up 14% over 2008.
A little later in the year, we updated the “look and feel” of the Hub Designs Blog, branding it as the “world’s fastest growing blog covering master data management and data governance”. We’ve gotten more than 43,000 hits since we started writing in July 2007, and our readership more than doubled in 2009, to about 27,000 hits per year.
We published six issues of our “Best Practices in Master Data Management” newsletter this year. We publish the newsletter about six times a year to roughly 3,300 subscribers.
I wrote six articles for Information Management magazine, including some popular ones on “Product Information Management Challenges”, how to build a business case for master data management, and how to select the right MDM vendor for your organization. I also wrote for Identity Resolution Daily, on “The Growing Role of Identity Resolution in MDM” and “Matching – MDM’s Secret Sauce”.
With our partner Siperian, we wrote a white paper in August called “When Data Governance Turns Bureaucratic: How Data Governance Police Can Constrain the Value of Your MDM Initiative” that has generated quite a bit of discussion. You can download a copy of it here.
A second white paper, called “Best Practices for Leveraging D&B in Oracle E-Business Suite”, was written in partnership with Dun & Bradstreet. It describes using D&B information to drive better supply chain performance for companies using Oracle E-Business Suite. You can download it here.
I volunteer for the Education Committee of the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG). A big part of that effort lies in programming the MDM track for the annual conference. This year, it was in Orlando in May, and I really enjoyed speaking there and seeing people from the Oracle community that I don’t see very often. Here’s a link to my OAUG presentation.
We participated in conference calls with Oracle Development during the year, and ultimately attended the Oracle Fusion “Hands-On Validation & Testing” session for Customer MDM at Oracle headquarters in August. It was a great chance to get some early insights into Oracle’s next major product release and to see the progress Oracle has made in building out its Fusion MDM vision, which is striking in its powerful hub technology and its elegant & productive user interface.
In 2008, we attended the Gartner MDM Summit to decide whether to exhibit there in 2009. We were impressed enough with the conference that we did exhibit in 2009, in October in Los Angeles. We had a positive experience, so we’ll be a Silver level sponsor in April 2010 in Las Vegas. Since we specialize in MDM and data governance, we find the association with Gartner’s MDM event a powerful one.
I didn’t attend Oracle OpenWorld for the past couple of years, but this year I was glad I did. It was like “old home week”, seeing people from Oracle itself and from the broader Oracle community that I’ve met over the past 15 years. David Butler, Senior Director of MDM Marketing at Oracle, posted my presentation on Oracle’s web site, and said “you were our cleanup hitter and you hit a home run with the bases loaded”.
We also did webinars with our partners Siperian and Initiate Systems. The Siperian webinar covered the differences between MDM platforms like Siperian and ERP platforms like SAP from a master data perspective. The Initiate webinar, with Initiate’s CTO Marty Moseley, discussed developing strong MDM business case, deploying core MDM technologies and lessons learned on the “build vs. buy” question.
Social Networking
After experimenting with social networking in 2008, this year we had a coordinated strategy to use the Hub Designs Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to communicate & collaborate with our clients, potential clients, team members, partners, suppliers, etc.
It’s a pretty simple strategy. Short updates (140 characters or less) go out on Twitter, and are re-published on both LinkedIn and Facebook. Longer updates (i.e. blog articles) are published on the Hub Designs Blog. We encourage responses and feedback using @replies on Twitter and comments on LinkedIn and Facebook, as well as longer-form comments on the blog. And we get them – almost every blog article gets at least one comment, sometimes as many as a dozen.
When a new blog article comes out, we notify everyone via a single update on Twitter. What’s amazing is that during 2009, social networking now drives about 15% of the Hub Designs Blog’s total traffic. And one of our clients gave us some good feedback that our social networking activities help her stay current on what we’re up to, and help her feel connected to us as a company.
Another social networking experiment that developed further in 2009 was the MDM Community. We started this using Ning (a “social network in a box”) in November 2008, out of frustration with LinkedIn’s “Group” functionality. It now has more than 210 members, from 23 different countries. It’s still a work in progress, but if you’re interested in master data management or data governance, you should check it out at http://mdmcommunity.ning.com. It’s becoming an international “who’s who” of the MDM world.
Summary of Client Projects
In case you think the Hub Designs team has been doing nothing but marketing, writing white papers and magazine articles, speaking at conferences, and volunteering for user groups, here’s a summary of our 2009 client projects:
- Technology provider for vehicle dealers: integration of Oracle E-Business Suite with D&B data
- Payroll services company: integration of Oracle E-Business Suite with external credit information
- Information services company: technical support for customers using Oracle E-Business Suite
- Legal information services company: readiness assessment and product MDM strategy & design
- Simulation and engineering software company: advisor to data governance board
- Manufacturer of oil and gas equipment: integration of Oracle E-Business Suite R12 with D&B
- Software company: built connector between Oracle AR and D&B’s DNBi risk management solution
- Technology company: customer MDM strategy workshop
Out With The Old, In With The New
This past year has been a lot of fun, but it has also been somewhat exhausting. So I’m looking forward to a bit more deliberate pace in 2010.
We’re very excited about the coming year at Hub Designs. We’ve got some great projects underway and in the pipeline, and we’ll be continuing to grow and expand to meet our clients’ needs and market demands.
In closing, I’d like to say how grateful I am to my family, for their patience with my traveling so much and for their unconditional love.
Hidden Costs of Duplicate Customer Data
A client asked me last week about what rate of duplicate data was “normal” in customer master data.
My initial answer was that, among companies that don’t have any formal master data management, data governance or data quality initiatives in place, duplication rates of 10%-30% (or more) are not uncommon.
When I was at D&B, we used to routinely see that level of duplication in client’s customer files.
In a study in the healthcare field, Children’s Medical Center Dallas engaged an outside firm to help clean up their duplicate data:
“Solving both the current and future problems around duplicate records helped Children’s improve the quality of patient care and increase physician acceptance of the new EHR. The duplicate record rate was initially reduced from 22.0% to 0.2% and five years later it remains an exceptionally low 0.14%. The 5 FTEs initially tasked with resolving duplicate records have been reduced to less than 1 FTE.”
“For the Children’s Medical Center, the results were heartening, not only from a care delivery standpoint but also because of the significant cost-savings that can be realized. A study conducted on Children’s data showed that on average, a duplicate medical record costs the organization more than $96.”
So it is possible to get the duplication rate down to really low levels through careful analysis and the application of the right tools, as part of an ongoing data governance program. Even the hospital above (and hospitals are usually not mentioned as practitioners of best practices) was able to maintain a duplication rate of only 0.14% after 5 years.
And there are very real costs to not de-duplicating your customer data. Depending on the functional area (marketing, sales, finance, customer service, etc.) and the business activities you undertake, high levels of duplicate customer data can:
- annoy customers or undermine their confidence in your company,
- increase mailing costs,
- cause hundreds of hours of manual reconciliation of data,
- increase resistance to implementation of new systems,
- result in multiple sales people, sales teams or collectors calling on the same customer,
- etc.
The best studies I’ve seen of the cost of duplicate data have been in the healthcare industry. One study I saw said:
“According to Just Associates, the direct cost of leaving duplicates in an Master Patient Index database is anywhere from $20 per duplicate to several hundred dollars. The lower cost reflects the organization’s labor and supply costs to identify and fix the record while the higher expense reflects the costs of repeated diagnostic tests done on a patient whose previous medical records could not be located.
The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) estimates that it costs between $10 and $20 per pair of duplicates to reconcile the records. If the records aren’t reconciled, however, the costs are even higher.”
Here are three more case studies backing up the range I quoted of 10%-30%:
- Once the analysis was complete, Sentara discovered they had a significant duplication rate, over 18%. They had attempted to address the duplication rate in the past through a remediation process, but due to either technology issues or because the cost of merging and cleaning up the duplicates across their many different systems was too high, they had not yet successfully reduced their duplication rate. Source: Initiate Systems success story
- Emerson Process Management faced a tremendous challenge four years ago in getting its CRM data in order: There were potentially 400 different master records for each customer, based on different locations or different functions associated with the client. “You have to begin to think about a customer as an organization you do business with that has a set of addresses tied to it,” says Nancy Rybeck, the data warehouse architect at Emerson who took charge of the cleanup. Working with Group 1, Rybeck analyzed the customer records for similarities and connections using everything from postal standards to D&B data, and managed to eliminate the 75 percent site-duplication rate the company suffered in its data. “That’s going to ripple through everything,” she says. Source: DestinationCRM.com
- Problem: Number of duplicate records: 20.9% of Utah Statewide Immunization Information System records. Impact of Problem: Difficult to find patients in system—key barrier to provider participation, risk of over-immunization—unable to find reliable patient record, cost of unnecessary immunizations, risk of adverse effects on patients. Source: health.utah.gov.
And here’s a good quote from a white paper titled “Data Quality and the Bottom Line” by The Data Warehousing Institute:
“Peter Harvey, CEO of Intellidyn, a marketing analytics firm, says that when his firm audits recently ‘cleaned’ customer files from clients, it finds that 5 percent of the file contains duplicate records. The duplication rate for untouched customer files can be 20 percent or more.”
Every organization will need its own metrics, but left unchecked, the duplication problem is a hidden cost that drags at your company, slowing down your processes and making your analyses less reliable.
If your sales analysis reports can’t be sure that there’s one and only one record for each of your largest customers, then the sales figures for those customers are probably not right. So the entire report becomes suspect at that point.
I’d like to end with a great quote on data quality by Ken Orr from the Cutter Consortium in “The Good, The Bad, and The Data Quality”:
“Ultimately, poor data quality is like dirt on the windshield. You may be able to drive for a long time with slowly degrading vision, but at some point, you either have to stop and clear the windshield or risk everything.”
Please let us know what you think by commenting here. We’re interested in hearing your thoughts on data quality and the issue of customer data duplication.
