Ignorance and Data Management

A dentist friend of mine (call him Larry here) recently emailed me via LinkedIn, asking me to endorse his work. It struck me as odd, but not because he wasn’t recommendation-worthy. Larry’s quite good at what he does. Larry had taken care of me before and I had subsequently recommended him. My initial reaction to his request was befuddlement.

I assumed that he had deleted my recommendation by mistake.

I was wrong.

It turns out Larry had created a new email address for himself in Gmail. Rather than editing his LinkedIn account settings to reflect this change, he decided to create a new account and identity, something that Larry had done as well on Facebook a few days before. Larry didn’t understand the consequences of creating a duplicate record for himself, none if which is good.

When I received Larry’s new LinkedIn endorsement request and figured out what he was doing, I responded by telling him that he needs to stop immediately. Change your email, I wrote. Preserve your unique identity.

Now, Larry’s not a data management professional. Again, he’s a dentist. But this story illustrates a major and often overlooked point about data management: Some people just don’t understand the consequences of their actions. In Larry’s case, adding additional LinkedIn and Facebook profiles (read: duplicate records) effectively splits his world into multiple parts. To put it mildly, this makes things confusing for others–and him, for that matter–to effectively manage his contacts, recommendations, and groups. Larry1 and Larry2 will compete for attention, unless the real Larry deletes the Larry2 profile. The longer he waits to do this, the more work he will cause himself.

Thankfully, I stopped Larry before the Larry2 profile really took hold. I nipped it in the bud. No real damage was done.

Looking Broader

Now, let’s take things up a few levels. Consider the following scenarios:

• Think about the sales rep who enters new customer information (e.g., a new record) every time that he speaks with the same prospect?
• What about the HR clerk who carelessly adds additional job codes because she’s too lazy to find the right one–and the application hasn’t been configured to prevent her from doing so?
• An employee in purchasing creates new entries on the item master, negating internal efforts to clean it up.

Unfortunately, I have seen all of these things happen in my years as a consultant and, unlike with Larry, in each case the fix has not been nearly as simple. Many people do not understand the downstream effects of engaging in poor data management practices. While applications and systems can be locked down to prevent outright abuse and certain innocuous mistakes, no system can be completely safeguarded against human error. People still matter, big time.

Simon Says

In the Rush song, “Chain Lightning”, there’s a particularly profound lyric: Ignorance breeds imitation. The implications of those three words for data management cannot be understated. Intelligent organizations need to make sure that their employees are sufficiently trained not only in what they need to do, but in what they need to avoid doing.

Employees who know the right way–and the consequences of the wrong ways–can act as an additional internal check against data management abuse and errors stemming from ignorance.

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What say you?