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.