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Beep! Beep! The American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA) held their Region I Conference this week in Portland, Maine. Thought leaders and industry professionals seized the opportunity to network with each other, learn best practices from affiliate agencies, and share insights on what’s to come in the continually evolving world of motor vehicle administration and public safety. Portland, Maine provided a beautiful backdrop to the week, especially as conference attendees set sail on a sunset ferry cruise to Peak’s Island for a lobster dinner! 

In today’s data-driven world, you will hear buzzwords thrown around like MDM, big data, machine learning, data lakes, etc. But then you may think, how exactly do these concepts apply to my organization and my specific role? How can I deploy the most valuable data management processes? To answer these questions, it is important to understand what modern data management looks like at a high level, and then how are businesses are using modern data management to refine business processes and enable best practices. Understanding the concept of modern data management is the first step in deciding how to enable it in your organization.

This week I had the opportunity to join leading marketing and Ecommerce professionals at the Internet Retail Conference & Exhibition (IRCE) show in Chicago, Illinois. While the windy city may be known for its beloved Cubs, Blackhawks, and deep dish pizza, this week it became the pinnacle of Ecommerce. Thousands of industry professionals attended to collaborate and discuss some of the problems they face and some of the innovative things they’re working on. While this show had a multitude of businesses attending, it was clear that consumer-centric organizations were king.

In the world of data management, there is a lot of terminology that is used interchangeably. For example: validation and verification or fuzzy matching and identity resolution; these are similar terms that are widely used in our ecosystem. Data quality and data governance are two examples of terms that are not synonyms, but are often confused, and with good reason. These two terms are symbiotic, meaning they are interdependent on each other. You don’t really want to do one without the other.

If companies are collecting data, but it's inaccurate or outdated, they're only going to get themselves into trouble. Here are three examples of data quality best practices.

After collecting email addresses through various channels and validating only the form and syntax of those collected through their Ecommerce channel, Cabela’s had amassed a large number of suspected “bad” email addresses over the years. Experian Data Quality's batch email cleansing solution helped them recover a significant portion of email addresses to include in email marketing communications. 

NameSearch is Experian Data Quality’s premier matching solution that can accurately and efficiently identify duplicates within your systems. NameSearch uses fuzzy matching to identify records that lead to the same individual, despite the misspellings, nicknames, typos, extra, or missing information across a single or multiple databases. It’s useful for organizations in any vertical that might require a matching solution, and, because of that, it is highly customizable.

Reading the statistics on cart abandonment rates can be quite sobering. Sixty-seven percent of online carts are abandoned before a purchase is made and, apparently, about 97 percent of mobile carts are abandoned. The reasons oft quoted are myriad but one of the bigger issues is simply the time it takes to check out; the longer it takes, the more likely that your customer will become distracted. Plus, when the shopping process requires any significant amount of typing on a mobile, forget it! Although you have to find a way to enable accurate address capture and to collect other important information, requiring customers to input too much is surely one reason that the mobile abandonment rate is so high.

I recently received an email from Hubway, the bike-share program here in Boston. The subject read “Join the 2017 Hubway Data Challenge presented by Microsoft – over $7,500 in prizes.” Now for a little bit of background information, I am a regular user of Hubway. I live next to a docking station, so to get to work every day I take it to the nearest subway stop, which also has a docking station. I do this again on my way back home each night. On the weekends, I sometimes take it to the gym, which conveniently has two docking stations within walking distance. On a few occasions, my wife and I will bike from Fenway Park after a baseball game to the closest Red Line subway station to avoid the foot traffic. Let’s just say I use it a lot.

Do you consider yourself data driven? Do you use the data you have to make informed, strategic decisions? If so, you’re in good company. In fact, more than 80 percent of organizations believe that data is an integral part of forming their business strategy. With such an emphasis on making informed decisions, it’s really important to trust the data you’re working with. Right?