Data Stewards and Maintaining Quality Data

InterAction includes powerful features that you can use to ensure your InterAction database contains complete, accurate, and well-formatted data. However, because these features are so powerful and can affect large amounts of data quickly, LexisNexis InterAction recommends that you should only give access to these features to a specific, well-trained group of users. This chapter helps you to identify these users.

This guide uses the term “data steward” to refer to the role of maintaining data quality. This is not necessarily a job title, nor a full-time job. Depending on your organization’s needs, you may have one or more people who perform this function full-time, such as data administrators or data quality specialists. If your organization does not have the need for a dedicated staff, the data steward function may be just one of many responsibilities assigned to a particular person or group.

Why is Data Quality Important?

Data quality is a critical component of any successful CRM implementation. Bringing all of a organization's contacts into a central repository will shine a spotlight on duplicate and incomplete data. The task of cleaning up the data, merging duplicate contacts, standardizing data, and resolving discrepancies is one of the most important aspects of implementing CRM. If you do not allocate enough time and resources to this data maintenance, users may be reluctant to embrace CRM because the data may be unreliable.

Not only should the contacts in your database be free of duplicates and discrepancies, they should also be correctly identified and categorized into the proper collections. In addition, the most important contacts should be profiled completely and accurately, including historical and factual information about the contact, as well as having important business relationships recorded.

Determine what is important about your contacts. Obviously, the database should be free of duplicate contacts and addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses should be up to date. Other information that the organization relies on for new business development, such as size and annual revenue of prospect companies, industry codes, board memberships, etc., may be important enough to focus efforts on gathering and maintaining. These items will determine where the data stewards will focus their time and efforts.

For more information, see the following topics:

• Maintaining Data Quality
• Completing and Maintaining Contact Data
• Data Steward Responsibilities
• How Many Data Stewards Do I Need In My Environment?
• Data Steward Key Skills
• Tools Used by Data Stewards