Data Management – Types of Data October 23, 2008
Posted by Julian Bradder in Uncategorized.Tags: customer communications, customer data, data, fuzzy logic, hierarchical data, management, master data, metadata, transactional data, unstructured data
trackback
In order to understand how to manage data within an organisation, the first step is to understand the different types of data that exist.
Customer Communications Management processes are heavily reliant upon data and it is vital that organisations have confidence in the quality of their before embarking upon a program of sophisticated customer communications.
I’ll be discussing data much more but first lets start by taking a look at the different types of data that you are likely to find in your company.
Transactional Data – This is data that relates to sales, purchase activity, refunds and other financial transactions.
Unstructured Data – You are currently reading unstructured data. Unstructured data is found in emails, documents, websites, project management tools, graphical tools and so on.
Meta data – Metadata is data about data. Particularly now XML has been embraced, XML documents contain descriptive information about data. It can also be represented within an relational database management system as a column heading.
Hierarchical Data – Describes relationships between various pieces of data. It may exist within systems or may be stored elsewhere to describe networks and relationships. Hierarchical data is based upon a parent child relationship. Thus it might be used to describe the relationship between a data item in one table say ‘customers’ and the data in another table say ‘last order date’.
Master Data – Master Data is the fundamental data that is used to manage the business. It describes customers, products, places, dates and times, concepts (such as a contract, agreement, or purchase order document). Master data is critical to an organisations success. Many larger companies may be formed from acquisition and merger resulting in an individual customer being named James in one database and Jimmy in another. Creating master data involves reducing James and Jimmy to a single data entity.
Both the processes to derive Master Data and, how we use these different types of data in customer communications management processes is critical. I’ll talk more on this subject tomorrow.
Comments»
No comments yet — be the first.