ADDRESS MANAGEMENT: WHY ONLY ONE WAY?

The following is a perspective by postal commentator Gene Del Polito. The views expressed are the author's.

To thousands of businesses across America, the U.S. Postal Service serves as a very important vehicle for conducting business communication and commerce. Consequently, it's important for those who businesses are tied to the postal system to understand why it does what it does. There are times it's hard to discern the Postal Service's wisdom without also suspecting some nefarious plan.

For instance, address hygiene is an extremely important issue to the Postal Service. That’s understandable when you consider that the address serves as the means by which a letter originating with person A finds its way to the home or office of person B. The mailing industry, particularly at this point in its history, appreciates the need for accurate addressing. Inaccurate addresses impede mail delivery, and if mail doesn’t reach its intended destination, the whole reason for using mail as a vehicle to communicate is lost.

In years past, listening to discussions between the Postal Service and mailers on industry addressing practices was akin to listening to Bud Abbott and Lou Costello go through a rendering of "Who’s On First." Each thought the other knew what he was saying, even though they didn’t.

Getting everyone on the same address hygiene page was one of the key reasons the Postal Service developed – with substantial industry input and support – the National Change of Address (NCOA) program. Early in the NCOA development process, the USPS realized the address matching skills of some within the industry were far superior to others. Consequently, NCOA was developed as a series of address matching expectations that would be implemented by certain, selected, licensed agents who would derive their own software approaches for accomplishing the desired ends. Major list processors, for instance, had vastly greater experience than the Postal Service in address management services including duplicate elimination, matching lists against alternative forms of addressing, and others. So the approach the USPS took with NCOA was to enable itself and others to benefit from those experts in the industry.

To some, though, NCOA had a problem of limited access to a vital address hygiene tool. To get around this, the USPS developed FastForward as its own "black box" addressing tool, which now has morphed into a series of "address-link" services. The first of these was NCOALink with other "links" on the way, e.g., a new LACSLink service which was announced at this most recent National Postal Forum.

A good thing, right? Sure. Provided, of course, that nothing was done to lessen the availability and power of other address hygiene alternatives. Unfortunately, it appears as if the Postal Service has embarked on a road that will do just that. By changing the whole method by which address management software companies are provided access to address change information, the USPS is about to transform the entire address cleansing scheme from a relatively open process to one that will be essentially closed to competition and innovation.

Under the NCOA scheme of things, licensed NCOA vendors were provided text-based address information that served as the basis for mailer address change matching services. Providing access to such raw information challenged mailers to develop and apply a number of address matching and identification algorithms to ensure a most accurate match. The licensing of more than one NCOA vendor introduced an element of competition among the licensees to develop and apply the best possible address matching tools to find its place in the marketplace.

Under NCOALink, the industry’s address matching and hygiene gurus no longer will be provided raw data access. Instead, the process of identifying changed addresses will be strictly controlled through the use of a single, unmodifiable algorithm developed by the Postal Service itself.

On its face, this new process will make it possible for those who simply do not have the skills and resources to develop sophisticated NCOA-like software tools. In a sense, NCOALink can be characterized as an effort to "democratize" access to address change information. It may be that, but it’s also much more.

Under the NCOA program, NCOA licensees had a strong incentive to improve their address matching algorithms to afford mailers the tools they needed not only to identify changes of address but also to fulfill all the other requirements that are a part of modern direct mail targeted marketing. Sophisticated licensees had developed a panoply of options which empowered the mailer to decide whether to send or withhold his communication to any prospective recipient.

To make matters worse, without the NCOA trusted agent relationship that has existed over the past few decades, there will be absolutely no way for mailers to gain access to the very rich information that formerly could be provided to explain in precisely what manner an errant address failed to match. Under NCOALink, the most a mailer will ever know is that an element within the address has been deemed deficient. In what way and to what degree no one will ever know. That, it would seem, would remain a mystery wrapped neatly in the Postal Service’s black box.

Now, there is absolutely nothing about NCOA that should preclude the value and utility of an alternative NCOALink service, and vice versa. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem as if the Postal Service sees it that way.

Rather than allowing both services to exist side-by-side within the marketplace, the USPS has thrown its lot with NCOALink and has abandoned the original NCOA. And here’s the rub. If NCOALink is an effort at "democratization," it also must be recognized as a redefinition of the state of the address matching art.

If the skill and sophistication brought to bear by NCOA licensees are abandoned, then the postal address management art can be thought of as having been brought from former "least common denominator" standing to some less exacting "greatest common denominator." In other words, the skills and benefits that flowed from providers competing to improve essential address hygiene and matching tools will be lost by defaulting to one address matching approach devised on someone’s computer down in Memphis.

This whole approach to things can be likened to an Intel restricting access to its chips only by those who agree to a Microsoft view of the world. Forget that the tools afforded by a multiplicity of flavors of UNIX or LINUX actually might provide more powerful vehicles by which to accomplish a specific task; all of this is to be sacrificed to ensure a strictly Intel scheme of things. Sure, Microsoft may be the software of choice of many PC users, but at least it the decision is one that is left in the hands of the PC user and not the result of some microprocessor manufacturer’s fiat.

There are benefits to fostering an environment in which the more traditional NCOA approach is allowed to co-exist with an NCOALink. To the best of anyone’s reckoning, there’s no downside to doing so. Why, then, is the Postal Service so set on restricting address management to its own, proprietary approach?

For those with suspicious minds (and that includes me) there can seem to be only one reason. It must be that the Postal Service is working its way toward establishing hegemony over address management. Today, its NCOALink and LACSLink. Tomorrow, it’s CASSLink or any other link the Postal Service can fashion. One could conceive of a time when the Postal Service will attempt to extend its control over address management and supplant the likes of a Pitney Bowes, Group One, PostalSoft, or any other of today’s providers of address management software. After all, controlling the many facets of address management could provide the Postal Service with an excellent way to bolster its sagging mail volume revenue. Or is it just that the address experts in Memphis really think they know what’s best for the mailing industry notwithstanding the industry’s decades of address management experience?

Again, there is no reason why two systems can’t live side-by-side. There is no reason why the market can’t determine the superiority of one system or the other. There is no reason why private sector creativity and the quality it brings should be shut down simply because it makes some bureaucrat’s life easier by enabling him or her to deal with one system rather than two.

Now, please, oh, please, let someone in a very high postal place show me I am absolutely wrong.