Bidding Adieu to Data Maintenance.

For the past two years, members of The Bond Market Association, New York City, have updated their own records, allowing TBMA to focus on data quality. The key to this change is our use of Web technology combined with an old-fashioned mass-mailing technique.

TBMA has developed its own membership system, WebLinks, that allows us to send a member an e-mail message containing a link to a page on our Web site. This page is actually a prefilled membership form containing data retrieved from our database. The member can modify his or her name, address, telephone and fax numbers, and e-mail address as well as update his or her areas of interest. By clicking on the submit button, the member updates TBMA's database. Within seconds, the member receives an e-mail confirmation, along with a link to the page on which the changes appear.

To open its database and still maintain prudent security measures, TBMA makes use of the mass-mailing technique known as document merge. First, a query is run against the database to gather the information on members we intend to contact. The e-mail message contains a link to the member-profile form, followed by a marker indicating where we want the member's ID number to appear. As WebLinks sends out each e-mail, it replaces the marker with the member's ID, which allows each e-mail message to have a personalized link to the Web form.

Encryption is critically important. Many membership systems, for example, use consecutively generated ID numbers. If unencrypted IDs are used, anyone could insert numbers into the member-profile form and poke around your database.

TBMA has designed its member form so that an invalid ID number generates e-mail messages to various systems department staff regarding the attempted break-in. TBMA has yet to uncover evidence of a real hacker; however, this trip wire has alerted staff to members experiencing problems.

It's important to note that before TBMA could allow members to perform data maintenance, it had to open its database to the entire staff. This process necessitated a change of emphasis from "who had access" to "improving data quality." To support this shift, a membership sys tem needs to be able to 1) log changes made to member records, 2) test for duplicate records, and 3) generate automatic reports concerning members to senior staff to allow them to check the accuracy of modifications.

TBMA is now seeking to develop the technology to tailor conference promotions to individual members. The objective is to streamline the registration process so that the member only has to enter a credit card number.