The web user experience vs. data quality.

I sat in on a very interesting meeting with a client today that I wanted to share.

My client is a large multi-national service provider. They maintain an enterprise wide automated marketing system that is used primarily for communications (as opposed to lead gen).

They have several web development groups who are responsible for various corporate web sites. All of these sites feed contact data to the marketing system. However, the group responsible for the data collected (my primary client) has no control over how the response forms or landing pages are built by the various departments which own the sites and none of the other sites employ the same upstream data quality and standardization tools used by my primary client. Some of the problems that result are:

Company name is the primary focus for corporate data analytics, but most of the response forms do not ask for company name;

Some of the response forms ask for delimited names (i.e., first name, last name) and others ask for the
respondents name in a single field;

Some forms ask for email and phone, some email only;

Some data points required on one sites form are omitted by other sites; and,

Without universal requirements and data standardization, duplicates become a problem in the marketing database.

The web development groups are focused solely (at least it was apparent to me from our dialog) on the user experience. They have very little interest in the data received from their respective response forms.

I’m sure other organizations with multiple web sites offering different types of content share these same problems. But there is very little discussion on this topic that I can locate on the web.

Can anyone steer me towards others dealing with this topic?