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New Orleans was the site of this year’s Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing Users Group (OUUG) Conference. The shift from Scottsdale, Arizona and the interest around the selected topics generated the largest attendance in the conference’s history! The tracks for focus were around Customer Billing, Meter Data Management, and Workforce Asset Management. This was our first year sponsoring the event, and we were pleased to be met with genuine interest, as well as a strong following for Experian swag!

Think of classic combinations: peanut butter and jelly, summer and beach days, mornings and coffee. Though the components that comprise these pairings do just fine on their own, they are somewhat incomplete without the other. That’s how you should think of data governance and data quality. 

As many states continue to undergo customer relationship management (CRM) system modernizations, one key driver is open data. Open data is the process of granting information access to the public, which includes converting data to a format easily consumable by citizens. What data are we talking about? Maybe your citizens are interested in Census data, the location of available retail parcel space, or the trending price of produce. The topics vary widely and states need to figure out how to support all of it in a scalable and organized way. If residents can access that data online in an easy-to-consume fashion, that’s one less person calling into the agency or adding to the in-person queue at your office. As the trend sweeps across the public sector, more and more agencies are trying to figure out how to grant access to open data.

Data has quickly become one of the most valuable resources for agencies across the United States public sector. In fact, 87 percent of agencies consider it one of their greatest strategic assets. This year, Experian conducted our first-ever study focused solely on the public sector to gain insights in the primary drivers behind their data management practices. We surveyed 200 professionals from across the United States who work for the federal government and state and local agencies including health and human services, law enforcement, departments of motor vehicles, labor and unemployment, and tax collection. 

Data is quickly becoming the currency of the digital economy. The organizations that are able to best leverage their data for strategic decisioning will be well-poised for success in the years ahead. Nearly all of the C-level executives in our study (95%) believe that data is an integral part of forming their business strategy—a sentiment that has grown by 15 percent over the prior year. 

Businesses that are planning to start an email marketing campaign have been urged to make sure their messages are interesting to recipients straight away.

According to Carol Lustig of marketing specialist Media One, a company must outline its intent at the very start of an email, Campaigns & Elections magazine reports.