DMTI Spatial


Friday, April 30, 2010

Address Governance: How Is Your Organization Managing Their Addresses? - Chris North, VP Customer Advocacy and Product Management, DMTI Spatial


Last week Alex MacKay talked about the 7 most important topics concerning Location Intelligence in business today. One of the key topics that continued to surface was Address Governance.....today I’m going to discuss that in a bit more detail.

Wikipedia defines “Governance” as “... the activity of governing. It relates to decisions that define expectations, grant power, or verify performance...”. I like this definition for a couple of reasons. Mostly, I like it for the fact it talks about power and performance.

In working with Addresses, there are some fundamental tenants that organizations should apply to be able to leverage the power of Location Intelligence, and to be able to get the best possible performance out of their efforts. You can think of these as the three tenants of Address Governance: Correct, Current and Context. It’s easier to remember them as the “3Cs”.

1) Are Your Addresses Correct?

This seems like such a simple question. Yet, many organizations are surprised at just how complicated it can be to keep addresses correct.

What usually jumps to mind is address scrubbing; correct and full postal codes, proper spelling, and proper formatting. However, this is where traditional “address scrubbers” and geocoders start and stop – it’s all they do. For example, SERP certification is a way of ‘correcting’ an address, but even that is limited. What an address scrubber or address standardization tool doesn’t tell you is whether or not an address is valid. My house is #11, my neighbours are #9 and #15. There is no #13 on my street, but if you put down #13, my street name and the correct postal code and municipality – most scrubbers will happily process it and tell you it’s good to go.

For any organization it’s important to go beyond standardization and know if an address even exists (is it valid)? Are addresses in the correct location? This can be accomplished by companioning robust rules around address validation and standardization with a rich content environment. In other words, not only should addresses be checked against rules, they are checked against known existing addresses, Canada Post content, streets and other corroborating sources.

2) Are Your Addresses Current?

This speaks to the notion of address churn. Postal codes change, street names change, municipalities change. Here’s some statistics. In an average year in Canada, approximately 50,000 postal codes change, and this impacts about 1.75 million addresses. Also annually, roughly 100 municipalities change their name or geographic extent which affects over 3.3 million civic addresses. On average, 15% of the addresses in your database changed last year from this alone.

Beyond external change, there is change within an organization: customers move, are added, are removed. How do organizations track this churn? If you accept the principle of the first tenant of Address Governance (that you need to compare address to known content), then you also have to take into account that this reference content will change, and you need to keep that up to date as well. Some sources are updated quarterly, some monthly, and some sources are updated weekly. It’s also important to note that customer data is updated constantly. This attention to frequency ensures that you have the most up-to-date version of the truth.

3) Do You Understand the Context in which your addresses exist?

This is - in my opinion - the most interesting, most valuable and most important tenant of Address Governance. There are a number of ways organizations can exploit context. Proximity (to risk, to fire stations, to crime, to fraud) is a form of spatial context that impacts an organization’s assets (which are referenced addresses). The demographic profile of the neighbourhood in which an address lives is a form of spatial context. What sales territory is this address in? What wire centre is this address in? Consolidating two or more address lists or getting address infill is another form of context. Bottom line, context provides the business value that typical address management systems fail to provide.

So, ask yourself these three questions about the addresses you manage in your organization today. When you can confidently answer “yes” to all three, you are well on your way to being able to leverage the power of Location Intelligence in your organization.

Friday, April 23, 2010

First Issue, April 23, 2010 - Alex MacKay, CEO DMTI Spatial

Welcome to the DMTI blog on Location Intelligence. Our ambition is to provide a medium of collaborative effort to advocate the usage of Location Intelligence for business improvement as well as share stories of best practises.

In this first post I want to tell you about an event that took place in Toronto yesterday, an Executive Roundtable on Location Intelligence, at the annual DMTI user conference called Expedition 2010. The Founder of DMTI, John Fisher, and I hosted a roundtable for 20 Senior Executives from multiple industries, including Banking, Insurance, Telecommunications, Utilities, Postal and Public Sector.

Jim Carroll, Futurist and Innovation Consultant, kicked off the discussion. Jim consults with the Global 1000 every day and he is seeing Location Intelligence as one the hottest inflection points being discussed. In particular, he is seeing it on the agenda of Finance and Telecommunication companies. And different than 12 months ago when cost savings was the rage, today he hears the C level wanting to take advantage of “location” to drive new revenue. One interesting guiding principle that Jim shared was to “think big, start small, and scale fast.” He believes we have only scratched the surface of what Location Intelligence can offer, however he advises that with all new innovation it’s important to find early wins to gain momentum. In addition, the pace of the change around the use of location for business benefit is moving so fast, we all need to be ready to scale and quickly.

The main topics discussed during the 90 minute Roundtable dialogue included the following, which were considered by this Senior Executive crowd to be the most important in Location Intelligence today:

1. Is Location “mainstream”?

  • It varies based on industry and business function. In insurance for example Jim Carroll advised us that location is on the agenda of the top 25 insurance companies in the world. In many companies the location of key assets has been “mainstream” for some time (utilities) but for other functions, it’s not been utilized. In telecommunications Location Intelligence is making large impacts on marketing and serviceability but there is still a lot more opportunity.
  • The consensus of these 20 executives was that location is rapidly gaining recognition as a key business advantage, but for most industries “we have barely scratched the surface.”

2. Are silos still a big issue?

  • It is more an obstacle in some industries than others but there is agreement it is absolutely still a significant issue. It is the one key issue that seems to drive the need to get the involvement of the very top of the organization on side. In many cases this means the CEO or COO needs to get involved.

3. Where are the quick success hits in location?

  • This was a hot topic for this group. In Finance it would seem “risk” is the number one topic by far. In many other industries the fastest function to find wins is in Marketing. When it comes to building the ROI justification, there are many who feel cost savings is still the best method. However, it was recognized that as the economy fears of last year in the USA recover there is a rapidly growing need from the CEO level to target new revenues.

4. How are we all dealing with “privacy”?

  • We had a really healthy amount of commentary on this item, particularly around personal privacy as it relates to location privacy. For example, is an address part of personal privacy? There was a strong consensus that it was not, however there is a definite recognition that privacy is an important issue and one that needs to be carefully managed and respected. While all organizations seem to see significant marketing opportunities for Location Intelligence, they all are all experiencing the need to be “privacy” smart. In a future post, Kara John, DMTI’s SVP of Privacy and IP will delve into this topic in a lot more detail.

5. Are we underestimating the impact of social media in the “arms race” for location data?

  • With the level of executive in the room, this was a real interesting topic as the average age was senior to the generation that is embracing social media the most. The awareness of the growing power and opportunity of social media and networking is great. Everyone recognized that social media needs to be top of mind for anyone strategizing the use of location for business advantage.

6. What is the impact of the Cloud?

  • There was a lot of comparison to the evolution of ERP with the rapidly growing acceptance of many services in a SaaS or Cloud offering. It was generally also agreed that ERP tried but never really succeeded in providing enough cross company collaboration. It would seem Executives feel that Cloud strategies may represent an opportunity to have information sharing achieved at a much more advanced level that with ERP. Inside certain industries, and Finance was specifically cited, there may be many areas where data about certain geographic properties could be shared for the mutual benefit of the entire industry.

7. How is mobile changing the landscape?

  • In a word, “staggering.” There were a lot of examples that came out in this particular discussion. There is a Bank in South Africa that is totally based on Text messaging. Another interesting example of a new idea is a company named Waze, who give you points for driving roads that have not been driven on its network before. Simply put the new ideas being born every minute for mobile are huge.

In future posts, members of DMTI and invited guests will be talking about the above key topics in much more detail as well as many others involving Location Intelligence. I’m curious to hear what other topics you feel are really important to advance the usage of Location Intelligence for business improvement?