Inside ASI-AP

Although I am sure many of you wondered why we needed more sales product training on additional windows and activities in iMIS, I did ask Jay and Kevin to include this in the schedule for a couple of reasons:

1. We sometimes forget the simple stuff that actually makes iMIS very powerful, and

2. "Data management" is the #1 issue customers are telling us that keeps them awake at night.

My interest in this posting is really about point 2. The fact that iMIS makes it so easy to add a new field, add a new activity type, is that sometimes we may actually be exasperating the problem of data management because we make it so easy to track more data. We also tend to move quickly into a solution design mode - "well Mr Customer, we can either add a new demographic field, we could add a new activity type, we could add a multi-instance tab, or we could even add a new product for you". When really maybe we need to ask first "why?".

Here is an alternative approach:

Mr Customer, I understand you need to track this additional data field. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions about exactly why so that I can figure out the best way for us to do this? How exactly will you be capturing this data? Who is going to do the data entry for it? Who is going to keep the data updated if it changes? How often is it likely to change? How are you going to use the data? How often will you use it? I can see how you can ask the members to update the data themselves via your website - how many members exactly are currently updating their profile online? And how will you plan to update the data on those that don't? Do you think your members will actually see the benefit to them in having to take the time to update their own data?

One of the key parts of this discussion is keeping the data updated. You can introduce the concept of "slow moving" and "fast moving" data. Slow moving data is data that really never changes - like someone's gender or their birth date. Fast moving data is data that changes over time. Fast moving data needs to be updated by someone - and the who and how question needs to be answered. And this almost always leads to the question of why is that data being tracked, for what purpose, and is the benefit of that purpose exceeding the hard costs of maintaining that data.

Jay did some work last year that can help a customer look at their existing demographic fields and determine how well and how often they get updated. See Jay if you are interested in this some more.

I am also working with Mick to try and establish some wiki pages that are related specifically to "data management" and the 7 business drivers that provide practical advice to customers (plus the wiki pages also provide the ability for a wider audience to contribute to the advice). So far I have headings like:

Duplicate management
Relevance of data
Accuracy of data
Age of data
Ease of access to data

Feedback on this is very welcome on this important topic (email me or post a comment against this blog entry).