When I work with my clients on system selection or implementation, one of the things I love to praise them for is simple business rules. When they tell me things like "Our registration is simple; member or non-member, early-bird pricing, that's it," I can barely contain my glee!

Too often we're our own worst enemy when it comes to data management. Because we're making rules that are too hard to follow.

My recommendation: Seek to simplify.

Look at your rules for membership joins and renewals. Are they easy enough for a child to understand? Or do you have dozens of different options?

What about event registration? Is it as simple as the example above (e.g., member/non-member) or do you have a dozen different prices and options?

A famous social science experiment (the "Jam experiment") back in 2000 demonstrated the paradox of choice: give humans too many choices and they'll actually choose nothing (i.e., choose not to buy). The corollary to this experiment is that managing too many choices exponentially increases the difficulty of managing the data. Buyers choose less and the data created is harder to manage! It's a lose-lose.

Seek to simplify!