Picture it: 2009, Anytown, USA, Michael Morgan wants to buy a new car. Naturally, he would like to check up on his credit record and primary FICO score, so he takes advantage the two-a-year free credit report option and pulls his records.
Mike discovers that his student loans from Chase have been put on his credit report twice! His report shows that he owes thousands of dollars more than he took out for graduate school, and his address is incorrect to boot! The rage within Mike builds to the point where he feels it is necessary to call the credit bureau's help desk.
Mike: My report is incorrect!
Operator: Sir, you'll need to fax in form A-3 with two valid forms of ID to make any changes.
Mike: *rage* Why can't you just fix it over the phone?
Operator: I'm sorry sir....
Mike gets so intensely angry that he bursts an anyeurism and has to be rushed to the hospital for emergency treatment.
What did we learn?
Clean data saves lives! Ok, maybe that was an exaggeration, but clean data does make a huge difference in certain circumstances. Our local credit bureau, lets call them Equi-Trans-Perian, houses 280 million credit files in the US alone, containing large amounts of data on each consumer: credit lines, installment loans, liens and collections, and a host of demographic data is separate databases that can be matched up to the credit data. Equi-Trans-Perian has been in business for over 100 years, all that time collecting data on consumers and businesses and adding it to the database on a gradual basis.
They've had to move from word-of-mouth from shop-keeps to paper-based records to an IBM mainframe, each time suffering from data input issues and incongruities. Everyday hundreds of thousands of pieces of data are reported to this 'fictional' company's technology office in Alpharetta from banks, credit card companies, repo firms, and other vendors, all of which have slightly different ways of cataloging their customers.
What does it all mean?
Huge amount of data +
incongruous systems of input +
many many years of changeovers in technology and data input =
MOUNDS of important, life-altering data that has inconsistencies!
Good thing for us, Equi-Trans-Perian is the industry leader in cleaning their data! They have systems in place to verify information, determine what level of verification is needed for certain types of customers, and even give the OPTION to different customers of how clean their data can be delivered!
Not to say that this system is perfect. The huge amount of data proves to be a challenge, and every time a new law goes into effect (such as the Vermont do-not-solicit law or a new law in a Northeast state involving cell phone numbers), the data needs to be verified in new ways. Technology changes with the times, and the beast of a database can't always keep up promptly, causing issues like the one that poor Mike experienced. You may not always think of clean data as a big problem or as a very important one, but it certainly can be.
Poor Mike.
(Don't hate your credit bureau so much, they have a lot to deal with!)
~Jess~
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2 comments:
I had heard of a technology called NORA , well its more of up keeping data and providing references among data but one cool thing about this technology is that it can self clean outdated data or at least give a warning to the admin where is finds faults in the data. Is used in Vegas to keep cheaters away.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nora_%28technology%29
I'm honored to be killed off in a blog. The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
You can always count on Jess for a good credit union story. Can you share any stories on data integration and how it relates to clean/dirty data from your work experience?
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