InterAction offers a centralized database that allows everyone to contribute information. This is the optimum approach to keeping information current and maintaining high quality. However, users may not always add the most up-to-date or high quality information for contacts. Further, new contact information comes into the database from many possible sources, including Outlook, IMO, IQ, Mobility, the Web Client, the Windows Client, and Outlook Sync. One solution to this problem is not to allow users to make changes to existing information in InterAction. When this occurs, however, users create duplicate copies of contacts for which they can enter their contact information. Another approach is just to let users make any changes. However, this leads to an endless cycle of data cleaning work for your organization’s data stewards and may result in a potentially embarrassing situation if an important mailing is sent to the wrong address.
Using InterAction Data Change Management, you can avoid both of these situations. Professionals have control over their own contacts and are free to make changes to these contacts. Professionals can select which information they have for a contact that they want to contribute to the firm list. Using Data Change Management, data stewards can easily review changes that users have contributed and quickly accept or reject each change. This approach gives users the ability to manage their own contact data while giving the organization the ability to proactively manage data quality.
Data Change Management applies to the creation of new contacts as well as the editing of existing ones.
Organizations using Data Minder can create rules to enforce data standardization [data normalization] for incoming and existing data. This eliminates inconsistencies and reduces DCM tickets. The Home page of Data Minder provides a chart illustrating the number of changes occurring after applying the data normalization rules to the InterAction database.
Controlling Changes Made to Contact Information
Using Data Change Management, you can control the changes users make to contacts in the firm list. Users have their own contact lists in which they can maintain their own contact information for each contact in their lists. This gives users full control over their own data. Users do not have to share their information with the firm list, therefore the user’s contact information for a contact is only updated when the professional or a proxy for that professional changes it.
Users can, and should, however, connect the contacts in their lists with contacts in the firm’s list. Connecting to a firm contact provides several benefits including more robust contact data, more frequent updates, and a better overall profile of the contact. When a user connects a contact in their contact list with a contact in the firm list, the version of the contact is updated when changes are made by the user, provided that the contact information is not being kept confidential.
Essentially, when users make their contacts available to the firm, they are editing the firm contact’s information. For example, Ed Roberts changes Jane Tarnoff’s business phone number in his contact list. He has made the contact Jane Tarnoff available to the firm. Ed’s change is immediately processed and may update the firm’s version of Jane.
Additionally, users have the ability to directly edit the firm’s information for a contact. For example, Ed can view the contact information the firm has for Lisa Short, a contact not in his contact list, in the Web Client and choose to edit the business phone that the firm has for Lisa.
When either of these two methods are used to edit a contact, Data Change Management can manage the change. Based on rules and categorizations of contacts, you can decide whether Ed’s changes are automatically accepted or whether a data steward must approve a change before the information for the contact is changed.
Also, Ed can create a brand new contact within the Web Client. Depending on the configuration of the new contact rules, Data Change Management can manage how the contact is added to the system.
For more information, see the following sections:
- How Information Is Sent to Data Change Management
- Information Subject to Data Change Management