Data clean-up pays off for Business Link

Not-for-profit start-up advisory group Business Link for London (BLL) has saved £100,000 after embarking on a business intelligence project to clean up duplicate and incorrect information in the organisation's databases.

BLL was created from an amalgamation of several different Business Link groups around the city and it was this that created the initial problem with the accuracy of the customer contact data used for marketing and sales.

It saved us something like £100,000 in terms of avoiding irrelevant marketing campaigns to people that didn't exist and sending people out to businesses that didn't exist.

BLL is a public sector body funded by the London Development Agency, which provides diagnostic and brokerage services for entrepreneurs and small businesses with fewer than 250 employees as well as advice on finance and marketing.

Mike Pratt, data integrity manager at BLL, told silicon.com: "They just brought it all together and planted it into a database. At least 50 per cent was incorrect or duplicated."

Using business intelligence tools from First Logic, which has now been acquired by Business Objects, BLL has spent the last three years cleaning up the databases.

Pratt said: "We have reduced our duplication down to something like 2.5 per cent. It's fantastic progress in a short space of time."

Accurate customer data is vital for BLL's marketing campaigns and Pratt said the clean-up project has already paid for itself.

He said: "It saved us something like £100,000 in terms of avoiding irrelevant marketing campaigns to people that didn't exist and sending people out to businesses that didn't exist - not to mention the huge amounts of time in IT resources investigating these problems."

But despite this success Pratt warned that many organisations still approach business intelligence projects the wrong way.

He said: "Business intelligence is seen to be the solution to all their ills. But before they do that many companies don't do the groundwork. They need to ask what is it they are trying to measure, do they capture that data and do they have the quality of data to make it meaningful?"

As if to demonstrate that not all business intelligence projects are successful, Pratt said a recent Cognos business intelligence project centred around the BLL's PeopleSoft CRM system has been scrapped after failing to work properly.