To accomplish all of the features discussed in How Information is Sent to Data Change Management and Information Subject to Data Change Management, InterAction Data Change Management requires several components. These components determine the following:
- Whether a change made by a user should be accepted, reviewed, or submitted for approval
- If the change must be reviewed, who reviews the data
Also included is a component where data stewards can review and approve changes that users made through Data Change Management tickets. For more information about the Data Change Management components, see the following sections:
- Contact Types and Marketing Lists
- Rule Sets
- Rule Collections
- Data Change Management Inbox
- Application Server
Contact Types and Marketing Lists
Contact types are presented as folders in the Windows Client and types in the Web Client.
Contact types and marketing lists are used to categorize contacts according to their relationship to the organization. For example, a contact could be a client, prospect, organization alumni, or employee. Contacts can also have multiple contact types. For example, JMB Publications could be both a Client and a Prospect for your organization. When a contact type is applied to a contact, the contact is linked into the folder for that contact type. For example, if you apply the Our Personnel contact type to Ed Roberts, Ed Roberts will be linked into the Our Personnel folder. Similarly, if you link Ed Roberts into the Our Personnel folder using the Windows Client, Ed will have the Our Personnel contact type applied.
Marketing lists are used to manage the most important clients in your collection from a Marketing perspective. The lists can include information for mailings, seminars, business development, etc. Like contact types, you may have the same contact in multiple marketing lists. When a contact type is added to a marketing list, it is linked to the applicable marketing folder.
Because of the importance of some contact types and marketing lists, you may not want to allow users to apply a contact type or add a contact to a marketing list without having their actions checked by a data steward. For example, you may want to highly manage the contacts to which the Client contact type is added. However, you may not be as strict with contacts added to the Holiday Card marketing list. To manage this, you can set specific Data Change Management rules for contact types and marketing lists.
Rule Sets
Rule sets are used to analyze changes a user makes to a contact and determine how Data Change Management handles these changes. For example, if a user adds a new phone number to a contact, the rule set applied to that contact determines whether the change is applied immediately or if a data steward must approve the change before it can be applied.
Each rule set specifies the following information:
- The user or group who is responsible for managing changes made to contacts to which this rule set is applied. (The owner of the rule set.)
- If the rule set applies to a contact type, an external system, or a specific user. (The type of the rule set.)
- The rule collection used to determine how contact information is managed. (The rule collection used for the rule set.)
Rule Collections
Rule collections manage how changes to each piece of information are handled. For example, you may want to specify that when a phone number is deleted from a contact, the change must be submitted. When a phone number is added, however, no ticket is created. Each rule set or contact type must have a specified rule collection. InterAction includes several rule collections out of the box. For more information on rule collections, see Overview of Rule Collections.
What's the Difference Between a Rule Set and a Rule Collection?
A rule collection is part of a rule set. The three main components of a rule set are the following:
- Type - identifies whether the rule set applies to a contact type, a data set from an external system, or any InterAction user
- Owner - identifies the data steward who is responsible for managing the contacts affected by this rule set
- Rule Collection - defines the actual Data Change Management rules used by this rule set
A rule set defines who handles the data, which data is being handled and what rule collection is being used. The rule collection defines how the data is handled.
Data Change Management Inbox
Each Data Change Management user and group has an Inbox that maintains a list of tickets for all contact changes for which they are responsible. Data stewards can manage their tickets, prioritize and complete tickets from the Inbox. Users can do any of the following from within the Inbox:
- Accept or reject changes.
- Use the Comprehensive View to view all suggested changes for a contact in one dialog box.
- Send email messages requesting more information.
- Re-assign tickets to other data stewards.
- View contact details in order to learn more about a contact before approving a change.
- Review follow-up instructions for additional steps that must be performed when a change is made.
- Access more advanced data quality features such as duplicate merge.
Application Server
Application Server is used when creating and processing Data Change Management tickets. Therefore, in order to use Data Change Management, the Application Server must be running. If it is not running, users will receive errors when attempting to open their Data Change Management Inboxes in the Windows Client.
Additionally, the InterAction Windows Client must be able to connect to the Application Server without having to provide authentication for Windows or IIS. If you are prompted for such a login when attempting to access the InterAction Windows Client from the Process Manager system, you may need to set up NTLM authentication before Data Change Management works.