Nelson Tech Blog

…is that it’s so flexible and customizable!  Here’s what I mean: in the series of migration projects we’ve done in the past several years to move businesses from GoldMine to Salesforce, the existing GoldMine data is almost always much “dirtier” than the client realizes, and data cleanup is thus a big part of the project.  The main reasons include:

• GoldMine has been widely used in smaller organizations that typically have less formal (or no) procedures for keeping data clean;
• GoldMine has been a strong CRM system since the early 90′s, so there are a lot of systems out there with 10+ years of usage and data;
• data naturally degrades over time if not managed carefully, and that’s particularly true in CRM systems due to their basic nature (and their usage by, um, sales people…);
• business changes and personnel turnover lead to changing approaches for using GoldMine, with the vestiges of previous approaches left behind as duplicated records, unused fields, unused data in unused fields, inconsistent lookup lists, and the like.

But I think the biggest reason may be one of GoldMine’s biggest strengths: because it’s so easy to customize GoldMine by adding fields and tabs, changing layouts, etc., all the factors listed above get amplified.  The fields added by the first system admin may fall out of use when the market changes or a new sales manager or sys admin decides to use a different approach.  Then a few years later there may be another new sales manager or sys admin, so… you get the idea.  Often, after enough years pass, there are custom fields still visible on the main Contact form but not in common use, or worse yet, some folks use them and some don’t.

There are other issues that also contribute to the data’s messiness; e.g., the approach for using Additional Contacts may change over time or be inconsistent from user to user, which is partly due to GoldMine’s flexibility.  The Details tab is frequently worse in terms of data inconsistency, since it provides an extremely flexible way to track almost any info about a Contact.

When we analyze the data at the table level, which we must do to plan the conversion, we can more readily see how inconsistent it is, but that’s usually a bit of a shock to the client who’s never seen it that way.  So, prepare yourself for it if you’re planning to migrate to Salesforce or any other CRM – the cleanup work will still have to be done, but at least you’ll have planned for it.

Rick N.