You are at the stage where you’ve already realized that your company lives and thrives on data (research, development data, customer private data, contact list, spreadsheets and tables etc.). You work so hard and do everything you can to keep your data clean and consolidated, and once you finally have the system that delivers quality at hand, you realize that your data isn’t exactly safe. Bummer! Today, when information is as valuable as it is and companies cannot afford having it stolen, lost or disclosed, information security becomes the critical element and basically the driving force in most business processes.

All potential threats can be divided into external or internal ones. External threats include unauthorized programs (such as worms, Trojan viruses, spy-programs, etc.), and there is really no universal solution that would protect your company from all types of threats, that’s why there are so many specialized tools taking care of each particular problem. These can be efficient, I’ll have to admit. However, it’s the internal threats that usually make companies most vulnerable. And two of the most probable scenarios of information security violation are 1) the deliberate theft of confidential data by authorized users (or so called insiders) and 2) unintentional leak that can be caused by a number of factors (lack of awareness about company’s security policies, for instance).

When creating an information security system, developers try to extend its functional to the maximum so as it would ensure extensive protection. Even operation systems today contain security functions designed to increase the enterprise’s safety level. But this “universality” is unacceptable when speaking of valuable data. A universal security system becomes useless in corporate networks where internal threats (whether intentional or not) prevail.

A recent Forrester survey of 305 security and email professionals revealed some scary but realistic statistics:
1 in 3 companies investigated a breach of confidential data last year.
1 in 4 companies experienced an “embarrassing” leak of confidential information.
1 in 5 emails contains a legal, financial or regulatory risk.

Ways out? Again, a global approach. This article on EbizQ.net suggests Data Loss Prevention (DLP) technologies as a way of securing your most valuable asset and creating transparency by enabling companies to monitor and track the whole data flow. Transparency is good. Transparency is good everywhere actually. Come to think of it, transparency is the key to creating a healthy and productive environment. Even in data integration systems, transparency is a neccessity, allowing you to see where your sensitive data is going, how it’s being transformed and saved and howsecure it is during these transactions. Transparency is another global asset that needs to be integrated into the corporate system o values. You could say, of course, that transparency is just another vague notion (like total security and clean data), perfection hard to achieve, especially for the old market players with set processes. Hard, yes, but not impossible. It’s something to go for. In the end, when your transparency efforts deliver security, it’s your company that will benefit.

So, looks like get transparency equals get security.

p.s. keep in mind, like with anything that has to do with data cleansing, integration and migration, technology usually comes in more handy and much cheaper than employees’ training!

Did you know Salesforce.com has a LinkedIn group that you can join? The group already has over 1,000 members and only continues to grow. You can join Salesforce Professional Network over here. LinkedIn is after all THE proven old-school professional social network. =)

The Salesforce.com Professional Network connects former and present salesforce.com users, administrators and employees, allowing them to expand their professional development, exchange ideas, network and continue to be a part of the Salesforce.com community.

As a group member, you’ll have the option to make your profile available to other group members. You’ll also have a Salesforce Professional Network badge on your LinkedIn profile.

The conference will take place on May 13-15, 2008 in Las Vegas

Making the most out of your customer database and relations management solution is what every company wants. No doubt about that. Nonetheless, a huge number of CRM approaches prove insufficient and inefficient.

Here are the six aspects of CRM deployment that Richard Boardman in his recent article calls essential:

1. Poorly defined requirements
2. The availability of internal staff
3. Sign offs
4. Data Good systems require good data, and, if the new system is to be populated with existing data, it’s important that the quality of that data is high. Many organisations are surprised at how many data sources they possess and how poor the data quality is. The cleansing of data and reconciliation of different versions of the same record in multiple data sources can be very time consuming. While there are tools that can help, this process tends to be very manual, and is not something that can be fully outsourced as it requires considerable input from the data owners.
5. User acceptance testing
6. User adoption

I still think data is the key element in this. It’s how you approach, structure and work with your data that makes a difference in your company’s progress. I’d break number four into more precise items like
1. Well-defined data requirements
2. Customer Data Integration & Data Quality (including ETL, data cleansing and everything related to it)
3. Data management, that among other includes following through with your requirements and cleansing procedures rather than adopting a once-in-a-lifetime/lifecycle (whatever you wanna call it) scheme.

But I agree with Richard, you still need to be “realistic about the demands these projects will place on the organisation and manage expectations accordingly. Too often CRM projects are deemed failures because they failed to meet impossibly demanding and often self-inflicted deadlines. A better review of what’s involved and a more analytical appraisal of the availability of resources to meet those demands will go a long way to ensure project success.“

What’s data quality for you? Right customer contact information in your CRM? Think again? Data quality is more than that, much more than that. Product numbers, associated descriptions, part numbers, units of measure, medical procedure codes and patient identification numbers, telephone numbers, email addresses, commodity codes, vendor numbers and vehicle identification numbers, the list goes on.

This article in CXO describes some consequesnes of poor data quality:

For the CEO, whose ultimate responsibility is to increase customer retention and loyalty, the effects of poor data can have long-term, devastating consequences. For example, the inability to eliminate redundant name and address records results in additional mail-order campaign costs. Recipients of duplicate mailings are also likely to become frustrated and question the firm’s overall operating efficiency. If these redundant mailings each consistently misspell the individual’s name or address, the frustration level is likely to approach alienation or even a legal concern – especially if the recipient had previously made a request to the mailer that they be removed from the vendor’s mailing list or asked to be placed on an industry-wide, do-not-mail list.Add to this the cost of the catalogs or merchandise delivered to the wrong address and the real magnitude of the problem only just begins to surface. If a single customer is included in a company’s database multiple times, each time with a different value for the customer identifier, the company will be unable to determine the true volume of this customer’s purchases. It could even be placed in the embarrassing situation of attempting to sell the customer an item that he or she has already purchased. Poor data quality can negatively influence how a company is perceived in the marketplace and damage brand equity.

These data inefficiencies can also result in missed up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. Without a single view of the customer across the enterprise, it’s impossible to aggregate information to make decisions. This makes it impossible to distinguish between single-product and multi-product buyers, or between new and existing customers

For the CFO – who is in charge of regulatory compliance, managing security risk and other methods of limiting exposure – poor data can result in the company facing public embarrassment, loss of credibility, significant fines and even lawsuits. A forward-thinking organization should include data quality as a part of its everyday operations. While this may not happen overnight, recent regulatory and Homeland Security initiatives such as the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), Sarbanes-Oxley, the U.S. Patriot Act, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) can quickly spur a company to establish a solid data foundation.

[…]

For the CIO, who spends his days striving to achieve peak operational efficiency, inferior data quality can lead to missed opportunities to negotiate better rates with suppliers. Large companies can have thousands, or even millions, of suppliers. Unless you have precise data on how much total business you are conducting with a single vendor across all divisions, you are likely to pay too much for their service.

So what do you do to improve? The article suggests the following:

First,  conduct a Data Quality Assessment to help you recognize the severity of data quality issues.

Second,  adopt a well-defined Data Governance Plan across your organization. That is, define who owns the data, who is authorized to access the data, and which specific standards should apply to the data.

Third, choose a technology to serve as the backbone for the intelligent use and preparation of relevant customer data.

Sounds short and sweet, but try following it through. Will take a while, but you won’t regret it.

As much as you hear about the importance of data quality being the determinant of your organization’s success, companies all over the world still use inaccurate and outdated data in their daily work. In the bulk of information that piles up over the months, even years, you usually can’t even identify what’s more urgent and important.

The traditional ETL approach that quite a few companies have come to use sure is helpful. But once you’ve gone through its stages, it’s important not to forget that your new cleansed data is still constantly being enriched and changed. So in less than no time a new challenge emerges as you get your cleansed data mixed with new data that isn’t necessarity as consistent and reliable as it should be. What do you do? Try implementing a unified and repeated data quality monitoring approach.

The steps you could follow while at that include:

• Create a clear standard that your incoming data should match
• Identify the main issues with incoming data by checking it against the created standard
• Look for the ways to solve the identified problems (as a possibility you cold create a notification system to send out alerts whenever unvalid or inconsistent data is detected)

At the first glance this looks like it could solve your problems. But that’s just your incoming data. Another part of the problem lies in the clean data already stored in your warehouse. It’s validity isn’t everlasting, is it? Thus a few more things in your to-do list:

• Identify the most appropriate time span for your data to be re-verified
• Schedule your data verification system to conduct repeated checks according to the identified data validity time span

All in all, just keep in mind that data within any organization is a dynamic and constanly-changing asset, and data quality checking should become a repeated procedure, rather than a one-time practice.

We all know that the combination of contact data from many sources introduces myriad opportunities for error. There’s this bulk of databases with data entered by different people (and humans are prone to error, right?) at different time… and you have to trust all of it is correct and still up to date? Auch. Checking the validity by hit-and-miss method? Auch. Tired of dialing phone numbers from your CRM and hearing that you’ve got wrong number?

Well, you don’t really have to anymore. New CDYNE Phone Verification connector for Apatar data integration toolset can automatically verify and filter customer phone numbers before they enter CRM applications for you. And it doesn’t matter where your data came from, whether it’s databases (such as MySQL, Microsoft SQL, Oracle), files (Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, CSV/TXT files), applications (Salesforce.com, SugarCRM), or the top Web 2.0 destinations (Flickr, Amazon S3, RSS feeds).

This service identifies the phone numbers in your list that have new area codes following a NANPA split and replaces incorrect area codes. If the area code is incorrect or missing, Phone Verification can be used to identify the error or return the corrected one to update your data.

William Chenoweth, VP Director of Marketing CDYNE Corporation says:

“This new Apatar Connector provides customers the ability to automate their every day data management duties with scheduling features and visual drag-and-drop interface. The more automated the data cleansing process, the less expensive and more consistent the end result will be for your company.”

There’s more over here.

Most SaaS providers will be relying on open source within two years, according to the recent Gartner research.

No wonder, open source significantly cuts costs for SaaS vendors, although not for the users. The cost cuts are likely to “be used to increase profitability or invested in research and development.”

Open source will be used in the operating system, application server of at a database level and will make up 30 per cent of an application, said Gartner.

Robert DeSisto, vice president at Gartner, said: “The more SaaS vendors use open source in the technology stack, the lower their software acquisition cost becomes.”

Another factor in favor for SaaS expansion is the recent economic downturn, which directs users to a lower risk and costs solutions (provided by the SaaS market).

Well, that only makes SaaS vendors, like Salesforce.com (uses an open source database), Apatar (open source data integration provider), that have already adopted open source to a certain extent way ahead of the rest of the software market.

Here’s how you can overdo it with mashups. Ok, an internet umbrella…

Pileus is an umbrella connected to the Internet to make walking in rainy days fun. Pileus has a large screen on the top surface, a built-in camera, a motion sensor, GPS, and a digital compass, and it provides two main functions; A Social Photo-sharing and A 3D Map Navigation.

…erm…hello!! What in the world? When it’s raining, you usually try desperately to watch your feet so as not to step into water, so as not to trip, so as to know where you’re going. Just how are you supposed to watch the umbrella and walk properly? Or are we supposed sit on a bench under the rain and enjoy it? Sorry, I’d rather go home and get online, or use WiFi in a coffeeshop inside… but outside in the rain?…no.

The photo function is connected to a major web service “Flickr”. A user can take photo with a camera on the umbrella, and pictures are uploaded to Flickr in two minutes with context tags via a wireless Internet connection. User can also enjoy theirselves watching photo-streams downloaded from Flickr with simple operation of wrist snapping.

Come on, what’s wrong with the good old camera?

3D Map Navigation is powered by “Google Earth”. Detecting a location data from GPS, it shows a 3D bird view around the user. User can walk-through a city comparing the 3D views and real sights, and the map is always updated by GPS and a digital compass. As it has a large screen, it create virtual reality but not immersive.

I’ve got GPS on my iPod, thank you very much.

Now these two functions can be switched by simply fliping a switch. As a future direction of its development, putting a context data on the Internet (e.g. geo-tags on photos), it will be able to provide social local-navigations, social local-ads, and real-time in-place communications. The product aims to provide an augmentation of everyday life synchronizing information on the Internet and the real place.

mm…that’s more like it. Wouldn’t mind knowing what’s around while walking in the rain…To jump inside and have a cup of coffee, wait for the rain to pass. That’d be nice.

Did you know you could listen to your favorite song, watch the video, read reviews, related information and see what it costs on Amazon all in one interface? Musicmesh mashup allows you to do it all. The design and speed could be better, but the idea’s new. Do check it out over here.