During the Customer Relationship Management conference held on 23 Jan 2007, Gartner predicted that

“Poor customer service will undercut all IT efforts."

It was recognized that re-architecting the major application suite providers' platforms would delay the adoption of next generation of customer service contact center products until the first half of 2008. The recommendation, in the interim, was to focus on other high-value tasks, such as data cleansing,

Data integration and adding analytics for real-time offers and lead capture.

Ted Friedman, vice president of data management and integration at Gartner, and author of the Gartner report "Magic Quadrant for Data Quality Tools, 2007," says that

"Companies have discovered that data quality has a significant impact on their most strategic business initiatives."

Poor data quality severely inhibits many strategic business initiatives such as customer relationship management (CRM), business intelligence (BI) or any effort requiring significant integration of data. Here are some current statistics on data quality.