The modern business world is driven by data and some of the most valuable is customer data. Finding the best way to satisfy customers requires studying their needs and that means analyzing the data ...

Data collection has been the Achilles heel of all research endeavors. Proper data can be hard to find, acquiring it is often prohibitively expensive and cleaning everything up is time-consuming.

Haoyi Chen is coordinator of the Inter-Secretariat Working Group on Household Surveys, United Nations Statistics Division, New York City, USA. The world is more than halfway through the United Nations ...