My friend and colleague Rob Pitzer at the Smithsonian Institution asked me a great question: "How do you deal with the temptation to keep upgrading your website, when "good enough" would suggest you stop and focus elsewhere?"

This is an issue that we all deal with: How do we know what we've got is good enough and that we can move on? Believe it or not, there's an easy way to answer that, but most organizations won't know the answer. Simply ask yourself: "Has our site (or database, or meeting, or program) achieved its initial objectives?"

Ah, but what were our initial objectives? There's the rub. Because in most cases, whether its programs, products, websites, or databases, the initial objectives were never clearly stated or agreed upon. And without a measurable objective, there's no way of knowing if "we're there."

To answer Rob's question, I would ask "What were the objectives of the website, and have they been accomplished?" Was the purpose of the website simply to communicate information, like a brochure? Was it to allow consumers to buy things online? Was it to allow users to customize their experience?

Once we settle on the objectives, we then have to agree to measurements that prove we've reached those objectives. If the objective was to allow consumers to buy things online, then either they can or they cannot. And if they can, is the experience a good one or a bad one? If it's a bad one, we may need to refine the objective, so that it reads "allow the consumer to buy things online in fewer than four steps."

Without measurable objectives, we can't really say if we've achieved what we've set out to do. And we'll never know if good enough is really good enough.

Just received my copy of the book Membership Essentials from ASAE. The book is a collection of writings by association executives on such topics as understanding your value proposition, membership categories and dues structures, and financial metrics for the membership professional.

And why do I think this book is so good? Because one of the chapters, "Association Management Database Systems," was co-authored by me!

The book even comes with a CD of sample membership forms and spreadsheets. It really is quite a collection, and a must-have for anyone in the membership management business. So head over to ASAE's bookstore and buy yourself a copy. And if you like, I can sign it for you.

SearchCIO-midmarket.com has a list of five hot IT trends for 2008, and surprise, surprise, business intelligence is on the list. Business intelligence (BI) is so hot, I'm actually speaking twice on the topic in the coming weeks and months.

BI is the Web 2.0 of 2008. It's all the buzz. My clients have been asking me why BI is suddenly so hot. And some of them are even asking what BI is. 

Here are three reasons I think BI is getting so much attention:

1. The technology tools for mining data are becoming more affordable for the small and medium-sized business market. So the vendors are pushing this hard as a new product for a new market.
2. It's "sexy." At least, what the vendors show is sexy, because you get to see all of these dials, gauges, dashboards, and charts that display all kinds of information, in real-time. For geeks like me, that's pretty cool stuff.
3. It's the logical next step. That is, one reason you should pay so much attention to your data management is that there is value in the data you are collecting, beyond just the transactional aspect of it (i.e., just tracking purchases so you can send products). Data mining and business intelligence will help you find what that value is.

Having said all that, in a recent unscientific survey of nearly 100 association executives, fully 2/3 of them either have no plans for a business intelligence initiative in 2008, or have no idea what BI is in the first place. So yeah, it's all buzz right now.

I'll be writing a lot more about business intelligence in the coming year, so stay tuned. And if you come across some exciting BI issues, or your organization is embarking on a BI initiative, I'd love to hear from you.

One of the steps during the database implementation process is data conversion. Part of the data conversion process is identifying which data sets you want to convert (e.g., membership types) and which you don't (e.g., payment details for events from four years ago).

One of my simple rules of thumb for data conversion is the rule of 100 and 1000. If you have fewer than 100 records to convert for some given subset of data (e.g., committees), it is typically easier to re-key this data after the new database is set up, rather than trying to convert the data into the new system via some script.

On the other hand, if you have more than 1000 records of a given subset of data, it's typically least painful to write a conversion script and convert this data that way, rather than keying the data by hand.

So this leaves us with the "magical middle," those data subsets that have a count between 101 and 999. What do we do with these?

In most cases, if it's closer to 100 than 1000 (i.e., 250 records or fewer) it's still probably cheaper and easier to re-key the data by hand. This also provides the opportunity to clean up the data, correcting spelling or other errors that may be in the current data.

Once you start to push over 500 records, unless you think there is going to be an opportunity to clean up the data, re-keying by hand may not be the best choice. After all, re-keying actually introduces more room for human error.

As with all things in life, there are no hard and fast rules. There may be exceptions where re-keying hundreds of records makes sense for some reason. But applying the Pareto principle, using the rule of 100 and 1000 will help you quickly decide for the vast majority of data sets should be converted by hand and which by script.

This is a common problem across all of my clients, without regard to the system they are using. There are several elements at play:

1. Customers are busy, just like the rest of us, so they'll take the path of least resistance. If you don't make it obvious how to retrieve a password AND explain why that's better/easier than recreating their record, they'll keep recreating records. 
2. Customers are human, so regardless of how much we beg, cajole, and threaten, we will have some amount of dupes. No matter what. 
3. It's difficult to design a system that checks for dupes without creating all kinds of obstacles for the customer and slowing the whole process down, thus negating its value. 
4. We have to have systems in place for dealing with the dupes. I recommend to my clients developing several data integrity reports to check for this kind of problem regularly. Here are a couple of earlier posts on that subject: active vs. passive data management and weeding the garden.

Finally, keep in mind that, generally speaking, cleaning up the duplicate records is still easier and better than other alternatives (e.g., having staff do all the data entry, or setting up barriers that are so high that customers stop using the website.)

My point is that while we should continually strive to minimize dupes, we'll never eliminate them.

Anyone who has heard me speak about database management systems knows that I'm a big fan of users groups. One of the singular values that an off-the-shelf database provides is the potential to tap tens if not hundreds of other organizations that are using the same or similar software. I've written about the value of users group elsewhere (including here and here and here) but I've never written about how to actually establish a users group…until now.

Following are some tips for how to create and get the most out of a software users group.

1. Identify other customers of the vendor and contact them about their interest in creating a users group.
2. Like any other volunteer position, those who get the most benefit are those who put the most into it.
3. The key is to find a solid core of leaders (four to six is ideal) among whom you can split up the responsibilities.
4. When it's appropriate, you should let the vendor know what you're up to. But I think there's more value in keeping the group independent, with the vendor being invited to certain meetings, having a designated liaison between the group and the vendor, etc. In other words, if you ask for financial support from the vendor, you'll have a different dynamic than if you do this independently. I think independent is safer and better/more effective.
5. This takes time. The group probably won't really gel for two to three years.
6. The most value you can get from a users group is helping the vendor focus their resources on what matters most to most of the clients. In some vendor's cases that may be customer service. If you've got a representative group telling the vendor what the big problems are AND offering potential solutions for the vendor, they'll be much more receptive to it.

For those in association management, this is actually a no-brainer, because creating a users group is just like creating an association. So put your CAE hat on and build that users group.

I'd be interested to hear what other tips readers would suggest for creating a users group.

I recently received a copy of NTEN's CRM Satisfaction survey (you can get your own copy here). Here are my reactions:

• One conclusion drawn from the survey suggests that "after sales support" and a "user friendly interface" were the two most valued factors in a CRM system. This nicely validates something I wrote almost eight years ago.
• It was interesting to see that of the 22 systems that made the survey list, only four got an "A" (or A+ in one case) for "value." In all four cases, the systems that received those grades are free. I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
• Of the 22 systems profiled, only two (Avectra's netForum and Advanced Solutions' iMIS) are broadly used in the association market. This survey covered the broader "non-profit" market (of which associations are a subset). Non-profits tend to focus on fundraising, for example, more than a typical association might.

I think this survey will be useful to non-profits considering CRM systems. Kudos to NTEN for putting this together.

Full disclosure: EDM is an independent third-party consulting firm. This means we have no financial relationship with any of the vendors mentioned in this blog. We provide unbiased opinions on what we see. In addition, NTEN is a former EDM client.