"Problems without solutions are not problems, they are facts of life." A form of this quote is attributed to James Burnham, a philosopher and political scientist.

I've always loved this quote because there are so many "problems" in the world of data management. One that immediately comes to mind is duplicate records.

No matter what you do as an organization, you will always have duplicate records. Always. There is no solution to this problem.

But you can (and should!) make every effort possible to avoid duplicate records. For example, many AMS systems now have built in tools for detecting potential duplicates, even at the point of data entry. These are a big help. And your login process should allow individuals to easily request their login info if they can't remember it. And you should be running periodic reports from within your AMS to identify potential duplicates and clean them up.

But you know what won't go away, even with these tools in place? Duplicate records. Because they are a fact of life.