Overview

Data enhancement is a process to add value to information by accumulating additional information about a base set of entities and then merging all the sets of information to provide a focused view of the data. To understand the value of data enhancement, consider this scenario. You are a sales manager, and your entire compensation is based on commissions on the sales that you and your team can make. Imagine that the director of sales handed each member of your staff a list of leads containing names, addresses, and telephone numbers. The chances that any particular representative will close a sale with any random lead are relatively slim, and therefore the strategy is to hire many untrained sales representatives to make the calls, hoping that the volume will make up for the indeterminate probability of making a sale.

Now imagine that each marketer was handed a list containing each sales lead's annual salary, the amount of money each has spent on similar products over the last 5 years, where the sales lead lives, a list of the last five purchases the lead has made, his age, marital status, and number of children, along with a set of scores describing that individual's purchasing profile. Which of these lists would you rather have?

That second list, containing enhanced data, is basically the original list improved by adding the extra personal and demographic information. The marketers can use these enhancements to increase their effectiveness by prioritizing the sales leads in the order...