A report on a recent business survey found that, on average, out of every £6 spent out of their budget, departments wasted £1 because of poor data quality. Business people are aware that having clean data that gives accurate information helps them swim away from their competitors, but many still struggle to keep their heads above water rather than invest in data quality solutions.

Got a direct mail campaign coming up? The marketers have prepared an excellent mailing with an eye-catching design, a tempting offer, a powerful call to action and prominent contact details. Everything is lined up to handle the responses and the business is holding its breath for an onslaught of interest.

But even with all this in hand, bad list preparation can virtually kill the campaign, waste the marketing budget and cause lasting damage to the reputation of the business. A bad mailing list that hasn't been checked by data cleansing software can even take you outside the law and result in costly fines.

Data Deduplication is the removal of unwanted records from a file or database; cross matching is the process of comparing one database against another to identify relationships which lead to accurate data integration/migration and construction of a single customer view.

The use of data cleansing solutions can help businesses to improve their IT security levels, it has been suggested.

Data deduplication processes are continuing to mature and develop, it has been suggested.

Data cleansing work can be an important part of successful data quality initiatives.