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Andrew Millington, managing director of software company Exclaimer, designed an add-on programme to his customer relationship management (CRM) system in order to improve data management. He says it has increased his turnover by 20 per cent.

‘The problem is that we have a high volume sales system, with only four sales people getting 100 leads a day across different countries, all of which need to be chased in the right order at the right time. We also gather important market feedback through the questions we ask, which is analysed in the CRM.’

Millington decided to create his own software to improve staff performance and to refine the quality of his market research. ‘It’s a script designed so they can’t progress without entering answers to each question and if a customer is meant to be contacted at a certain time an alert will go out.’

Rob Karel, principal analyst at technology and market research company Forrester Research, says that more companies are adopting data management technologies as a way to improve returns on IT investments.

‘The vast majority of data management enquiries I field from my clients are not about technology,’ says Karel. ‘They’re about the soft stuff: how do we organise ourselves, how do we build a business case, how do we engage the business, how do we define return on investment, how do we decide roles and responsibilities. This is what my clients are feeling pain around; this is data governance.’

All-round performance

The term data governance describes the best practices for handling data that organisations should adopt if they are to derive the most value. ‘Those organisations that have done it well have done it in a very targeted fashion. If you aim to govern the 20 per cent of the data that impacts 80 per cent of your processes and operations, that’s a great start,’ he says.

However, Karel adds that it is no good simply investing in new tools. Businesses seeking to solve deep-rooted data quality problems that have undermined their long-term IT investments must begin by sorting out whose responsibility it is to maintain relevant information.

‘All these vendors are tools vendors, so absolutely they are going to evangelise about the tools that support the data governance processes,’ he says. ‘But the tools are not solving the problem. They are simply enabling a data governance process that must be designed and owned by the organisations themselves.’

While some organisations will want to pursue the holy grail of “master data management” (MDM), Karel explains, others will be happy to pick and mix the data integration and data quality techniques that will deliver the quickest and most impressive returns.

For Millington the benefits of such technologies are manifold: ‘We are updating the data on the CRM all the time so, for example, the person in tech support will now know exactly what’s been said between the customer and sales team,’ he says. ‘Since we’ve been using the new script our CRM records are near perfect with duplicates and useless information kept to a minimum. Our sales conversion rates have measurably improved.’

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