Acuate Data Quality

Welcome To Our Blog

Hi, its Anish Raivadera here, welcome to our blog.  If you are involved in CRM, Marketing, Data Quality, Business Intelligence or anything related to corporate data then this blog is dedicated to you.

 

 

What Every Manager Needs To Know About Data

The 7 Dimensions Of Data Quality How To Master Data Cleansing

Two Informative Guides

We look to provide practical help in getting most out of your data.  Whether you are migrating data, improving your target audience data or cleansing to improve campaign returns or meet regulations, you’ll find something here for you.

My passion is for software and data, and how the two can make significant difference to anyone’s data capabilities.

Having undertaken hundreds of data projects in different organisations we see common patterns in the way organisations manage their data. We bring to you our findings and best practices to make your life easier when managing data.

Visit our website www.acuate.com for all our offerings, but there are lot of useful posts here as well.

To Your Data Success, Anish.

Are Your Data Practices Working For You

I couldn’t have said it better than Jeanne Ross, research scientist at MIT; ‘Getting to one version of the truth doesn’t have anything to do with accuracy, it has everything to do with declaring it’. For a business, not having one version of the truth could mean not knowing if there’s a problem, how big it is, what the cause is. It could mean a team is doing redundant work or not doing enough based on the information they’re being given. The lack of vital, reliable information could prove fatal for a business. Collaboration across and within teams is key,... Read more →

Data Should Tell the Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth

Disclaimer: I didn’t make this image, cartoon credit to Timo Elliott Ronald Coase, Nobel Prize winning Economist, said that ‘if you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything’. Data analysts are under constant pressure to make the data fit the decisions, rather than letting the data speak for itself. This thankless task means having to rework the data and tweak the narrative to present the answer that the people in charge want to see. Working around this type of confirmation bias can be detrimental to an organisation. You’d have to ask yourself, what insights are you really... Read more →

Direct Marketing ROI

Do you want to understand the true value of your data, explained through a simple yet compelling calculation? Check out the video below. Contact Acuate for your FREE, no obligation data audit. Read more →

Why Keep Bad Data?

It’s like healthy eating, if you’re not used to it, there’s a crazy up-and-down cycle of trying to eat healthily, succumbing to fast foods, trying to eat healthily, succumbing to fast foods, and on it goes. Then one day, you crossed that pivot point, you’re now a healthy eater, and you have the self-control to avoid and manage eating fast foods. Or, you just give up and stay unhealthy! You justify this by noting that you only live once or what’s the point of living unhappily or something along these lines. Either way, you use logic to back-justify your results... Read more →

A Small Outline on Big Data

Do you know what the term “big data” means? If you’re a data geek, chances are you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. But I’ll admit, when I first came across the term I thought it simply meant a greater amount of data than usual. But it’s not that obvious, the size of data is relative, and for the most part I was wrong. So despite the name, one would characterise big data not by its size, but what it is used for. The best way to understand is to draw comparisons againt traditional data. Big Data vs Traditional Data... Read more →

Excel is not a Database

A very common way for businesses to store data is within Excel. People are convinced of Excel’s superiority as a database. I mean, after all, Excel is familiar right? It’s easy and it’s user-friendly and you’ve been using it for years. There is just one problem with this – Excel is not a database. Excel was made as a spreadsheet application. Sure, it is a great complement to any database due to its ability to turn your rows of data into nice looking charts and reports. But when it comes down to it, storing your data is not a job... Read more →

Tracking Missing Contacts is a Sales Opportunity

If you have a business relationship with someone and they leave their company, then you lose that connection and potentially future business. But there’s an opportunity here, an opportunity to create TWO new relationships: a relationship with the company they moved to and a relationship with the person who has replaced them. Anyone who is in sales knows that following people that you have a relationship with can turn into new opportunities, and finding their replacement is an opportunity to forge a new relationship with new possibilities. The most common scenario is that contacts change jobs and your relationship with... Read more →

Why Address Data is Needed More Than Ever

For many years, when you mentioned data cleansing everyone thought of cleaning addresses. The rapid deployment of address management software in 1990s and 2000s meant that wherever you went, you were asked to enter your postcode and then your first line of the address. (The world learnt to enter addresses backwards!) The last decade has seen more solutions with international address cleansing and the integration into new technologies. So, the world’s addresses have got better, postal authorities now provide definitive datasets for their addresses and it’s a normal expectation to have address capture and management software everywhere. But many saw... Read more →

Profiling Made Easy

You’ve probably seen the movie ‘Groundhog Day’ when Bill Murray awakens only to re-live the same day over-and-over again. This is how we’ve been feeling over the years when clients send us data. We use the same techniques, same algorithms and same approach to clean poor-quality data. (Oh, if you’ve ever wondered what Groundhog Day is, then check out the quaint story on Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog_Day ) In the end, we got a little tired of repeating the same process by creating the same routines in SQL or writing the same code, so we decided to write a tool that did... Read more →

Matching the Un-Matchable

We get invited to solve some very complex data problems and what we found over the years is, when you take into consideration the exact nature of the data and context it is used in, then you can generate much better results. Generic matching engines are good for 80% of duplicates or matches you’re seeking, the remaining 20% need a lot more effort. (I’m using the convention that duplicates refer to records matched with a single data set and matches refer to records matched across multiple data sets.) For many people finding 80% is good enough and they can live... Read more →