Golden Databases – another quick return

Business, Information Quality, Information/Data Quality Issues, The Business of IQ / By / September 8, 2009 / , ,

I just received an email from an information quality tool vendor. It was sent to an email address I had provided to them in my capacity as a Director of the IAIDQ as part of registering for events they had run.

The opening line of the email reads:

I’m writing to you as a follow-up your recent telephone conversation with an [name of company deleted] representative.

Two small problems

  1. I haven’t had a telephone conversation with any representative from this company regarding any survey or anything else recently. (I did meet one of their Dublin based team for lunch about 6 weeks ago – does that count?)
  2. The personal data I provided to them was not provided for the purpose of being emailed about surveys. (But at least they have an opt out).

I’m going to take a look at the survey but I bet you the €250 raffle prize for participants that my responses will be statistically irrelvant.

For a start, the survey is about the importance of the investment in data in IT planning. I’ve never worked in the IT organisation of any business. I have been on the business side interacting with IT as a provider of services to me.

Also, as a Director of the IAIDQ and as someone trying to set up an SME business, I am basically hands on in all aspects of the business and implemenation of systems (I was working at 2am this morning doing a facelift on my company website and working on a web project for the IAIDQ). So, my responses will be misleading from a statistical point of view.

It looks like the company in question:

  • Had an email address for me.
  • Knew that my former employer was a customer (customer #1 for this particular company’s DQ offering)
  • Forgot that I’d told their Dublin team that I’d left
  • Had failed to update their information about me.
  • Have recorded a contact with me but have recorded it incorrectly.

Should I respond to the survey?  Will my responses be meaningful or just pointless crap that reduces the quality of the study?

I’m goint to ask a friend of mine to write a guest post here on survey design for market research and the importance of Information Quality.