In any company, management problems have a curious way of accumulating, like dust in a forgotten corner. It starts with small tasks that initially seem like just part of the daily grind. "Oh, I just need to send this email," you think, or "I just have to copy and paste this information."
But as operations grow, that burden becomes heavier, an invisible yoke that starts to slow everyone down, affecting overall productivity and turning into a silent ailment that no one points out. Our team, as a software development organization, has also suffered from this malaise, and we’ve seen it in our clients.
The Epidemic of Data Redundancy
Data redundancy problems are rampant in companies everywhere. A common phenomenon is the generation of multiple records in CRMs referencing the same sales opportunity, which drives salespeople to pull their hair out. And of course, our team has also suffered from this issue. Duplicate tickets in our support module grew like weeds. We dealt with them as best we could, manually moving information from one ticket to another, deactivating or deleting what we no longer needed.
People face these problems as they can, and we were a perfect example of that: our support team organized the data manually while they could manage it. Our message-moving tool helped a lot, but relocating support messages to the correct ticket is more like herding cats than attending to users. But, as often happens, our activity grew so much that the manual workload became unsustainable, and soon failures began.
Our project coordinators, who needed to tag tasks for easier retrieval, began creating labels at will. Thus, anyone entering the system stumbles upon a palette of similar but not exactly identical labels: "Urgent but not quite" and "High priority," "Critical." While it's true that color brightens our lives, in business management, a colorful palette of labels isn’t very useful. Unstandardized information grows like a pile of crumpled papers that just clutter and cannot be used by anyone.
The Noise of Duplication
Duplicate records create a layer that, like dense smoke, obscures our vision, hiding the clarity necessary to move forward. This phenomenon affects all types of businesses. If we solve the problem for ourselves, we can also offer solutions to others.
In this landscape, duplicate data creates a noise effect that distorts the clarity needed to operate effectively. Like fog on the road, it hides the path and makes visibility difficult, causing us to move more slowly and always at risk of an accident. This confusion not only hampers productivity but can also lead to wrong decisions and significant losses.
The need to seek a solution to this ailment that befalls us all at some point becomes imperative as our organization grows; we must look for solutions that help us quickly clear that fog to restore clarity and efficiency in our operations. Only then can we navigate safely and confidently down the road of business management, avoiding the noise of duplication from halting our progress.