And finally, after the data appending has occurred and been verified as totally accurate, what if the sales force is reorganized to include several key resellers who map out their sales territory boundaries differently from your company’s boundaries? Again, the data can be used to realign sales leads with the new sales force structure to ensure accurate results.

All of this relates to having to manage enterprise databases “on the fly”, with the flexibility to make mid-course corrections if more data points are required to meet new and evolving business intelligence challenges and requests. Organizations must be able to sanity check the accuracy of data – both the data the company has acquired and the data from outside sources. This requires alignment, meaning that all of the data conforms to the same definitions, as well as maintaining the integrity of that alignment.

It’s important to recognize that the enhanced data from the many data enrichment resources available will most likely be accurate from the perspective of the outside data broker or vendor. However, that does not necessarily mean that it will still be fit for use for your specific company needs.

At the end of the day, these alignments of BI data are only as good as the underlying quality of the new data coming into your system, particularly as it relates to preexisting data and how it is defined. For these reasons, companies investing in BI absolutely have to make sure data is standardized and accurate or risk the fallout from ineffective data management solutions, such as lost business opportunities and unhappy customers.

So once again, it really boils down to “garbage in – garbage out”.

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