Thursday, August 28, 2008

Serious need for DRY profile data

I wrote a post about DRY Data a while ago.  I just did the opposite of DRY - I repeated myself over and over again.    What happened was we went to Mexico, and my credit card bank freaked out, had us call twice to confirm we had our cards, and then went ahead and cancelled our old number and sent us new cards anyway.

That meant I had to go through two months of old invoices and find all the merchants with whom I had set up autopay, and change all the account settings to new ones.  What a complete pain!  And this is not the first time I've had to do this because, well, I tend to lose things.  There, I said it.

The first impulse is, why can't I just put this information in once and everyone gets it?  Well, easier said than done, right?  First of all, you have to set up a secure place to put this very sensitive information - name, address, credit card.  Secondly, you have to get people to agree to go there to get the information.

I do hope someone is thinking about this, though.  It is a real pain point.