When maintaining overall data quality, the data stewards are tasked with the responsibility of cleaning up the data, merging duplicate contacts, standardizing data, and resolving discrepancies across the entire InterAction system.
Often, by maintaining the quality of the data in your most important managed contact collections, you have a large impact on the overall data quality of InterAction. Instead of focusing on maintaining data quality for all contacts in InterAction, focus your efforts on your most important collections. For more information, see Completing and Maintaining Contact Data.
Because InterAction is well-suited to gather information from many different users into a central database, it may gather non-standard, inaccurate, or duplicate pieces of data entered by these users. InterAction includes several features to help prevent these issues; however, problematic data may still creep in. It is the role of the data stewards to prevent incorrect information from being entered into InterAction by monitoring the information added by users. In addition, data stewards regularly check for duplicate or incorrect information and perform various clean up tasks. This improves the quality of your database and heightens user interest in InterAction.
This role is often assigned to a user or group of users in the marketing department due to marketing’s dependence on good, clean data from all areas of the organization. Marketing users are also skilled in maintaining a database of prospects and customers. These users typically are advanced users and have attended InterAction training provided by LexisNexis InterAction.
Because the responsibilities of the data stewards impact the entire system, only a specific, well-trained group of users should be assigned the data steward role and have access to the powerful Data Change Management and data quality features.
The data stewards may need to invest a significant amount of time to the process of managing the data quality on an on-going basis. They will regularly have to monitor new contacts and user changes to contact information through Data Change Management. In addition to this, they must review the InterAction data and search for duplicate contacts, phones, and addresses, improperly entered contacts, or any other data inaccuracies that were not processed through Data Change Management. For more information on Data Change Management, see "Overview of Data Change Management" on page 1.
Assigning the Data Steward Role
Because the data steward role can have such a large impact on the InterAction database, you should carefully select the users who are given this responsibility. To help you identify the users who should be data stewards, review the following sections: