Malicious or Thoughtless?

Last night, as I drove into my subdivision, I saw a young girl, maybe 12 years old, unwrap a candy bar and casually throw the wrapper to the ground and walk on.  The wrapper blew down the street, before I could scoop it up.  Later that evening, I started thinking how similar that child was to some of my CRM users. 

I live in a nice, middle class neighborhood where most of the homeowners try to keep up the appearance of their property.  I administer a nice, average CRM system where most of the users like clean data.  That girl probably doesn’t much like litter and my users aren’t too fond of duplicate entries and missing address.  So, why did she throw down the wrapper and why do end users seem to go out of their way to muddy the data?

Three reasons.  First, lack of ownership in the property, be it physical sidewalks or ethereal records.  People who feel a connection to a place litter significantly less.  For some reason, our little litterer didn’t connect her living space with the spot she threw down the trash.  Similarly, when a system user fails to have a sense of ownership, he is much more likely to be careless with process.  The key here is to constantly impress on your people, the connection between CRM and their career success.  Be sure to listen to their concerns and make their voice heard when it comes to decisions.

Second, people are lazy.  Really, lazy, for the most part.  There was no trash container near her, so the ground had to do instead.  In a CRM implementation, if doing the right thing isn’t really easy, you might as well expect the wrong.  Make doing right at least as easy as doing wrong.

Those are the two reason that account for the vast majority of litter in the village and for the dirty data in the system, but I will mention in passing one more.  Even though we don’t like to admit it, some people are malicious.  Whether the person is angry and throws over a rubbish bin or your user feels like she got a raw deal from the company, so she deliberately destroys data, this is the toughest one to deal with.  I don’t have a good answer other than constant vigilance and a robust reaction if it is detected.  Thankfully, in my experience, this is quite rare.

Now if you will excuse me, there are some banana peels in my database and I feel the need to take out the trash….