Too much of a good thing ends up being bad, and the same is true for customers' contact data. If a database is overflowing with names and addresses without any order or established process for list cleansing and deduplication, the information may as well not be there at all, since it's nearly impossible to use.

Jim Harris -- writing an Obsessive-Compulsive Data Quality blog post sponsored by HP and the Enterprise CIO Forum -- calls up the Jorge Luis Borges story "Funes el memorioso" as an analogy. The story's character is unable to forget anything he learns, and with so many details clogging up his brain, he has no room to process the facts and turn them into knowledge.

With corporations collecting more and more information on their transactions, operations and customers, they run the risk of becoming "so lost in the details of everything Big Data delivers that you're unable to connect enough of the dots to convert the information into knowledge and unable, as a result, to achieve the wisdom necessary to [satisfy] specific business needs," he says.

While Harris is referencing Big Data, the analogy carries through to contact data quality. If your organization is not regularly combing through its files to pinpoint and match up duplicate records while also deleting outdated entries, it too could end up with a whole lot of information and no wisdom.