The 19th century economist Vilfredo Pareto made the startling (to him, at least) discovery that 80% of the land belonged to 20% of the people. His discovery has been immortalized in the field of management as the Pareto principle. The Pareto principle, which says you get 80% of your value from 20% of the causes, holds true in many fields of management including data management.
In the days before on-demand client relationship (CRM), I took over the leadership of an existing CRM implementation with a couple of hundred users in a global consulting firm. When I stepped in, the project had already consumed $1 million with no end in sight and no meaningful deliverables. As it turned out, the project would have profited if it had paid more heed to Pareto....
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