05/27/2004

Startup DataDelta launched a patent-pending tool for analyzing Business Rule Butterfly-Effects – which it calls “the key to effective Customer Data Integration (CDI) for building accurate ‘Single Customer Views.’”

The new vendor offered these details:

“Billions of dollars are being invested in CDI systems,” said Ed Allburn, DataDelta founder. “...When users attempt to improve accuracy by adjusting these business rules, even small changes can cause amazingly complex ‘Business Rule Butterfly-Effects’.”

“Users become frustrated because they can’t see the overall impact of business rule changes on the entire data warehouse, and the results users can see on isolated samples appear conflicting or worse, misleadingly fine. It’s like trying to solve Rubik’s Cube while only seeing one side.”

DataDelta works like an auto shop’s diagnostic computer that tunes-up car engines, but instead tunes-up complex CDI engines to maximize the match accuracy of merge/purge, de-duping, householding and single customer views.

DataDelta does not compete with CDI vendors because it enhances, not replaces, their products as well as companies’ own custom, in-house matching technology. Because it is vendor-neutral, DataDelta can also be used to scientifically evaluate competing vendors and service bureaus to see their previously hidden true strengths & weaknesses, including international Unicode & non-English data.

David Loshin, president of Knowledge Integrity, noted industry speaker, and author of "Business Intelligence" and “Enterprise Knowledge Management – The Data Quality Approach”, echoed this sentiment. "The ability to confidently rely on automated tools to accurately integrate customer information is vital for effective CRM, marketing and business intelligence”, said Loshin.

"Implementing customer matching systems is by far the greatest technical challenge involved in a new CRM project," said David Raab of Raab Associates, a marketing technology consultant and author of comparison guides for CRM and customer matching software.

Today’s sophisticated CDI systems often have over 100,000 business rules in addition to a bewildering array of configuration parameters and processing options. “When users attempt to improve accuracy by adjusting these business rules, even small changes can cause amazingly complex and surprisingly widespread changes – what we call Business Rule Butterfly-Effects,” Allburn continues. The concept of butterfly-effects is central to chaos theory and was popularized in a movie earlier this year.

Allburn expands on this concept’s application to CDI in his forthcoming book “The Art & Science of Customer Data Integration”.

“Users become frustrated because they can’t see the overall impact of business rule changes on the entire data warehouse, and the results users can see on isolated samples appear conflicting or worse, misleadingly fine. It’s like trying to solve Rubik’s Cube while only seeing one side – the sample results can appear fine while the rest of the data warehouse is in reality badly scrambled.”

“Adjusting business rules is often a major challenge,” confirmed Rhonda Drake, formerly Director of Customer Database and List Management at Reader’s Digest Association and now Assistant Professor at New York University and founder of Drake Direct, a respected database marketing consulting firm.

DataDelta works like an auto shop’s diagnostic computer that tunes-up car engines, but instead tunes-up complex CDI engines to maximize the match accuracy of merge/purge, de-duping, householding and single customer views.

DataDelta does not compete with CDI vendors because it enhances, not replaces, their products as well as companies’ own custom, in-house matching technology. Because it is vendor-neutral, DataDelta can also be used to scientifically evaluate competing vendors and service bureaus to see their previously hidden true strengths & weaknesses, including international Unicode and non-English data.

"At DataDelta we don't make the match engine, we make your current match engine work better," Allburn concludes.