My favorite quote from Peter Drucker comes from The Effective Executive (written over 40 years ago!!). On page 5, Drucker writes: “The greatest wisdom not applied to action and behavior is meaningless data.”

Quite simply, what Drucker was saying is that any information that you have that doesn’t cause you to change how you behave is useless. So for example, if your organization knows that certain segments of the membership never attend the annual meeting, yet you continue to market to them as if they do, then your knowledge of that is meaningless. It’s useless.

All organizations must have a willingness to change their behavior based on the data they have. The best business intelligence initiative in the world will fail if the organization implementing it refuses to change its actions or behaviors based on what it learns.

So ask yourself: Is your organization willing to change its behavior based on new information?

Don’t forget, I’ll be speaking at the ASAE Marketing and Membership Conference next Thursday, May 29, from 2.15-3.30, on how associations are using business intelligence to improve marketing and membership.

More info here.

I came across this in a business magazine. It seems Microsoft (and other companies) are producing children’s books to promote their products. You can even buy this on Amazon!

Selection and implementation of a new association management system is an incredibly trying process. If done well, at the end of it all, you’ll have a new system that will address your organization’s business needs. There is a natural tendency to think “we’re finished” once the new system is up and running.

But alas, our work has just begun. Data management is a process, not an event, and as such, requires us to continually review how things are going. I typically recommend to my clients that six months and one year after going live with a new system, they take a few days to do a complete system review (i.e., audit). The purpose of the audit is two-fold: To do a sanity check to ensure that we’re accomplishing the things we set out to accomplish when we first began the project; and to determine if there are new needs that have arisen since the project began that we’re not yet addressing.

In my experience, organizations typically find both; that they have not accomplished everything they set out to do, and that new issues have come up. But that’s okay. This is a process. Like adjusting your course on a sailboat, continually reviewing where you are an making adjustments as needed will ensure that you get to the right destination.

I’m frequently asked by clients to review their business processes. That is, to look at how they process information throughout the organization.

One way to look at this is to think about how many times a particular piece of data is “touched” by your staff. The more touches, the less efficient, and the greater the opportunity for error. Take, for example, a product order: if you have one staff person entering data, another processing payment, and yet another fulfilling orders, that is three different touch points in the chain.

The best way to look at this is to actually draw out a “process map” that shows what happens to the data, from the point it enters your organization, to the point you’ve finished using the data for that particular process. How often is the data “touched”? You may be surprised at what you see, and you may have an opportunity to introduce greater efficiencies and better quality data.

I recently had the opportunity to sit in on a CRM session presented by Paul K. Ward. One of the points Paul made about data management is that bad data destroys value. That is, bad data doesn't just annoy your customers, it actually causes damage to any relationship you may have built.

Consider a company with which you have done business for a long time. If you receive a letter or email from them that starts "Dear Customer," what is the first thought through your mind? Your first thought is "I've been giving you money for how long and you can't even be bothered with using my name?" The result is that you're not just annoyed, but you start to see the company in a different light. A more negative light. And damage is done to the value of the relationship.

So the bad data in your database isn't just a nuisance; it's actually working against you.

Here's a good article on technical training. Included in the article is the following brilliant observation:

“Block out time immediately after training to practice what you’ve learned,” says Wes Trochlil, president of Effective Database Management in Hamilton, Virginia. “Too often we go right back to work after training, rather than taking time to reinforce the learning that just took place.”

Be sure to read the whole article. 

As you can see at this link, the ASAE Data Standards Committee has released a preliminary set of standards for constituent XML. According to the site,

"For those who understand XML standards, the various documents will be self-explanatory. For those not used to dealing with these types of documents, this document should provide at least a place to start as the documents are reviewed."

This work is incredibly important to making all of our lives easier when it comes to integrating multiple systems. Please review the page and the included documents and comment on them. Note that you need not be an ASAE member to comment.