Good Quality Information

Business of all types run on good quality information.  Information can be true, false, or subjective and sometimes you can actually prove when factual information is true or false, but often times you are looking for information that is true without being able to determine, for sure, whether it is true or false.  All you can do is make a judgement call about the quality of the information based on it's source, how it was derived, and whether the assumptions it was based on are valid.  People, including scholars, disagree about the validity of certain data.  Often Republicans and Democrats disagree about the meaning of data.  CNN often has a more liberal interpretation of data than Fox News.  So data, and the meaning of data, is often subject to the interpretation of the interpretor.  Subjective information is just that, an interpretation of factual data.

When we go out and look for information, we are looking for the factual data and not the subjective interpretation of the data, because when we collect enough factual data it paints a picture of reality for us.  Our reality may be somewhat subjective in nature based upon what factual information goes into it, but we can test our realities by creating our own study.  My favorite study is a real life analysis of customer behaviors or a real life analysis of other data, based upon data collected within a computer system.  For instance, a website analysis tool can show where visitors to your website go, how often they are on your order page, what percentage order, how often they visit, and what searches placed them on your website.  This is useful so that a website can be modified to fit the visitor, the visitor can be collected differently to get the right kind of visitor, or the website routing can be changed to make it more useful to the visitor.

Information Technology (computer system) information can also tell many things about your customers buying habits, can help you order the right products at the right time, and can help you improve your operational efficiency.

Please review the following resources for more information about good information:

• Information Quality - Meeting Customer Needs
• The Importance Of Customer Data Quality
• Customer Data Quality: A Sales And Marketing Leadership Issue
• Amazon.com: Data Mining Techniques: For Marketing, Sales, and Customer Relationship Management