Customers Telling Us Data Quality Impacts Business Processes

By Len Dubois, Sr. Vice President, Marketing & Sales Support, Harte Hanks Trillium Software

I spent all of last week with existing customers and interested prospects at our Trillium Software Regional User Conferences in St Louis and Columbus, OH. It’s always refreshing (and informative) to hear about the anecdotes and practical sides of data management implementations that are successful, as well as the ones that face challenges.

A common thread running through their experiences is the need to pull senior-level executives into their data quality world in order to better define how information quality impacts business processes.  Business processes can be simplistic – the need to identify when an insurance claim has been submitted on more than one occasion for the same incident. Or, they can be more complex issues like determining which systems are authoritative and what processes must be implemented during the lifecycle of master data entities.

More successful organizations, and those further down the information management maturity scale, fully understand that aligning data quality or information quality practices to definable business processes provides the best chance of improving their business results most quickly. Better stated, when you fully define how poor data quality manifests itself within a business process, you truly get the attention of those whose jobs are evaluated based on the revenue generated from those same strategic business processes. Boy, that will open some eyes, won’t it?  

These business process optimization challenges are the types of engagements that our customers have partnered with Trillium Software to help them solve and it is enormously rewarding to know that they trust our experience and expertise as well as our technology to make them successful. 

I am looking forward to our next set of customer conferences in Boston and Philadelphia to hear what our clients have to say. Will you be in Boston on June 15 or Philly on June 17? Come by and we can talk.