Duane Smith

Duane Morrison Smith is a specialist in the areas of CRM, Database Marketing,
Data Quality & Data Governance.

Location: Sydney, Australia

Technical Skills (Data Quality): SAS DataFlux, SAP Business Objects Data Integrator, IBM ProfileStage, AuditStage, QualityStage

Duane Morrison Smith has been a consultant in the direct & data based marketing industry since the early 90’s. He has consulted and provided technology solutions in all facets of database marketing. These include sales systems, marketing systems, telemarketing systems, online directories, CD-Rom databases, mapping software, statistical software, direct mail software, relational databases and client server computing. Working with companies such as Software Solutions, International Data, Australian Business Information, Core CM* (later Salmat), Direct Marketing Software & SAS have provided him with a solid knowledgebase in his specialized area of Database Marketing.

Between 1994-2004, he was consulting director for a database marketing company called Database Marketing Solutions, which provided consulting, software and services to the direct marketing industry. During this time he was the major distributor for the LISTman software, which was both a database marketing and data quality tool. In 1997 he sold this technology which to IBM in Australia & Europe for the purposes of name & address parsing, data cleansing and de-duplication long before IBM acquired Ascential being their own software suite for data quality.

In 1999, Australia Post commenced initiatives to improve address data quality. The Australia Post program was called the Address Matching Approval System (AMAS). During this time, Duane through his company (Database Marketing Solutions) was a leading supplier of data quality, de-duplication and address quality software. As an early adopter of the new technology, he was in a position to deliver and educate people in improving data quality for a range of marketing activities and data quality initiatives.

In 2005, he commenced a new chapter more directed at data quality. While the LISTman software had some unique capabilities in combining both database marketing and data quality functions, it was not a world-class enterprise data quality solution. Working at SAS Institute in Australia, he first came across the DataFlux software, which is the data quality software owned by SAS.

In 2006, he started his first Data Quality Management role as Data Quality Manager at Perpetual, a funds management organization with a 150year history. It was during this time that all the skills and relationships he had developed came together. Knowing the data quality software market in Asia Pacific he could quickly get together a short-list of vendor solutions to meet the data quality challenges faced within the organization. The initial phase, of the project was the acquisition of a data quality solution and 12 vendor solutions were part of a software evaluation that was eventually refined to 2 of the leading vendors, IBM & SAS. It was a very close match between both solutions, however SAS was chosen and implemented as a desktop deployment with the Server solution to come later. In order to fund this technology, it was recommended that all current data processing performed by external data bureau’s would be brought in house with the cost savings paying for the software within 4 years. The second phase of this project was setting up a business as usual (BAU) data quality capability. The third phase was the establishment of a data governance board and a data governance framework. BearingPoint were engaged as consultants to assist with this program using the Mike2.0 methodology. This involved a data quality survey (Quickscan) and the establishment of a data quality group that would later become the board (committee) and a stewardship group.

He later continued this work on a short-term assignment at MBF, a major health fund in Australia prior to taking a well earned break in South & Central America in 2008 where he also did 2 months of volunteer work with children in Peru.

Duane is presently working on a major data quality program within a government organization. In this role he is using his experience with both data quality and data governance to bring both people and technology together.

Data Quality Pro Contributions: Data Quality Perception vs Reality

LinkedIn Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/duane-morrison-smith/4/207/240