Source Tracking
Trust is established faster when data from multiple sources are tracked for audit.
A simple list of customers obtained from various sources becomes more useful with reference links and timestamps. These help to track the sources better and manage synchronization.
While this process might appear to be like a burden for humans, machines require these reference links and timestamps to validate databases for accuracy and completeness.
Data Indexing
Before data is acquired, it is important to define objects that represent the kind of data you are seeking so you can setup collections with fields to organize your inputs. To get started, you can follow these guidelines to preserve data integrity while you setup databases.
As a first step, decide on the data structure you need and carry out checks against redundancy to avoid unnecessary duplicates. An example check would be to ensure that your collection of people profiles is only one in each database. That way, you can use reference links to track the collection, the fields that were received, added, or updated; their values and relevant timestamps.
With this data, third party applications can use the reference links to identify the source and destination fields and search their synchronization history to provide navigation across changes. One good feature derived from this is the ability to go back and revert changes or go forward and apply the same changes again. This can solve a lot of problems by providing effective data recovery.
Data In Transit
Some kinds of data would be constantly used daily for your business. A quick example is customer data. This kind is always in transit because customers' behaviors change every given day. The use of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system becomes expedient when you need to manage customers who have the potential to make decisions on your products and services daily.
When you collect data regarding customers or deals using a CRM, you can setup links to modules that organize the data for everyone in your organization to use for various causes. Smart developers of CRM software today always ensure that their products automatically carry out fact finding when data has been collected in volumes to make their use more effective.
When data is constantly synchronized between the CRM, sources and seekers, information is stored regarding these transactions to help humans and applications achieve more trust. It would interest you to note that there are many options for free CRM on the web today with products like Bigin, Zoho CRM and others so getting started is easy. Tracking is easier when data is indexed before synchronization.
