Data is more than bits and bytes in a database: it can tell you a lot about the health of your business and business processes.

Master Data Management (MDM) promises the holy grail of a single view of customers, suppliers and products. But haven’t we heard that before?

Tom Redman, a.k.a. the “Data Doc”, believes that information is an organisation’s most valuable asset, but almost all companies grossly underuse their data assets. From his work with hundreds of companies across many different industries, Tom’s diagnosis is that the cost of poor data quality to a business is typically 20% of its revenues. Couldn’t your business benefit from a revenue uplift of one fifth right now?

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) says that the world financial system is on “the brink of systemic meltdown”; Vince Cable, Liberal Democrat spokesman describes the situation as a “bank tsunami”; the City is talking about a potential banking “armageddon”. The unprecedented global financial crisis has left us all reeling; where were the

regulators when we needed them?

If I want to teach my dog to do something, I generally find it helps to offer her something in return. A small piece of cheese, or other tasty morsel generally does the trick. It doesn’t have to be anything big or expensive and, after a short while, when she’s learnt what it is I want. she’ll respond without the need for anything more than a “good girl” as a thank you.

What on earth possessed me to transfer my mobile, office and broadband lines in the same week? How could I be so naive as to think that it would all go smoothly?

According to a Gartner Research report, “Eight Steps to Implementing a Successful CRM Project” (October 2006), CRM project failures continue to run at nearly 50%. What the report fails to identify is that a significant number of these failures are due to inadequate data resulting from deficient data migration practices. Poor data quality leads to poor user adoption and poor CRM performance; getting the data migration right is critical to success.

According to a new Data Quality Benchmark Study by Tank! Action Group and Transactis, half of the organisations surveyed (some of the biggest mailers in the UK) have no data quality strategy in place and, instead, approach it in an ad hoc way, with irregular, unplanned attempts to resolve data quality problems. What is more, 40% of these organisations do not view data as a commercial asset, and are therefore unlikely to see it as worth investing in.

Financial services companies are risking their reputation and possible fiscal and custodial penalties by failing to recognise their exposure to potential criminal activity. As the deadline for implementation of the 3rd EU Money Laundering Directive fast approaches (15 December 2007) many money laundering reporting officers (MLROs) appear to be oblivious to the size of the problem they face.

It can be very tempting to view third party data as a silver bullet to all your data quality woes. take for instance the PAF (Postcode Address File), produced by the Royal Mail in the UK. They describe it as “the most up-to-date and complete address database in the UK, containing over 27 million addresses.” I’m not going to take issue with their claim and I regularly recommend that organisations make use of PAF data.