You wouldn't allow your children to get away with telling untruths to their family or friends, would you? And you certainly wouldn't let anyone else do so. But if you let data become and remain unclean, it will certainly be spouting nonsense to the rest of the company.

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.

Just as a horse has to be in tip top condition to win its race, so does your data need to be of really good quality to beat the competition. But managing the condition of your data is not as costly as maintaining a fit and healthy race horse. Data scrubbing - being able to remove duplicate records, maintain integrity and consistency - can all be achieved without having a massive weekly bill on top of an initial investment.

Would you put toxic fuel in your car and still expect it to take you wherever you want to go? It won't happen, will it? Toxic data is the same; a business running on toxic data simply can't perform.

So why keep on putting toxic data into the analysis engines and expect world beating results? It's not difficult to clean data before you use it. All you need are the right tools – a one off investment that could make all the difference.

Sometimes IT managers feel they could be losing the joust in trying to get the clean data message across. Everyone is so focused on their own aspects of winning the competitive edge, they don't see or understand that faulty tools could be undermining their efforts. Or if they do, it's why can't IT get it right for a change, or we've already invested in all these information systems, why do we need to spend even more money?

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.

Martin Doyle is a Data Quality Improvement Evangelist and the CEO of DQ Global, which is a UK-based data quality software and services vendor providing data cleansing, international address and email verification, data deduplication, and data matching solutions for Customer Relationship Management, Single Customer View, and Master Data Management. DQ Global has worked with over 500 businesses worldwide on a variety of projects, providing their clients with improved data quality, making their data fit for business use, and enabling them to trust their data and make decisions based on a foundation of fact.

Listen to the full interview here:

http://www.ocdqblog.com/home/the-johari-window-of-data-quality.html

Good content is data which is fit for purpose.  It should be:

Reliance on uncertain or obsolete names and addresses damages your credibility and reduces customer loyalty. UK and international address correction guarantees your communications reach their intended targets; and you avoid wasting resources on unwanted or undeliverable mail.

Just imagine, if your database held accurate, correctly formatted and duplicate-free data, you would:

• Make better, informed business decisions
• Improve profitability
• Dramatically improve response rates
• Generate increased sales
• Retain customers for longer

Is your data suffering from an overdose of duplicates, ailing addresses or just a general  lack of fitness for business use?

DQGlobal have come up with the following steps to get your data 'fit for summer'

Contact data management may be required to assist the promotion of Powerade Energy, a new beverage that is set to be made available by Coca-Cola Enterprises.

The importance of address verification software to the business operations of many organisations has been outlined by one expert.