How many times have you started a reporting project, an analysis project, or any project, for that matter, only to discover the data you were planning to use is just not in the greatest shape? In this world of big data, bad data is becoming more and more common. As we all strive to be more on-demand and personalized, we embrace the cloud, mobile technology, and of course, social collaboration and media. All the data we collect all day long is very valuable. But, unfortunately, we have let the quality of our data decline.
Knowing your data is bad is only half the battle, but it needs to be an immediate focus. We suggest spending time tracking the data entry point back and resolving that issue first. So many things can affect your data coming in, but fixing it from the start will help prevent the stream of bad data from continuing. The other half of the battle, after you have tracked down the input issue and found a solution, is fixing the existing data in your system. Data correction is only one specialty at Absolute Service Inc. (ASI), and we would be happy to lend a helping hand. Often, we can use one of many scripts we have developed to run against your exported data, correct the issues quickly, and provide you with clean results. But, as we all know, sometimes the biggest issue is either that the data was never collected to begin with or questions exist about the validity and integrity of the existing data. ASI has a large team of resources who work on these types of opportunities every day. Here are just a couple of examples of what we have done for customers recently:
- One of our customers had phone numbers for a 20,000+ set of data all stored in one single data field and we broke these out into separate fields (e.g. fax, main, mobile, other, etc.). Our team used the tools and pure manpower to go line-by-line and break data out into separate fields.
- Customer just completed an acquisition and was in the stages of integrating the data from the acquired company into their system. Unfortunately, information formats can vary between companies. Our staff researched these to find out who at each company should be receiving invoices, we captured their email addresses, and finally we provided our customer with the data in the format needed to update their systems.
- Customer received written and/or printed responses from their clients that included new and updated data. This info had to be confirmed and/or entered into an online system to ensure client data (e.g. name, address, phone, email, etc.) was up-to-date and current. ASI received these hard copies and made the data updates directly into the online system.
