First, management may not be allowing each salesperson to have his or her own format. They may be trying to discourage it by building the shared database. The question is, who owns the contact data— the salespeople or the dealership? If the salespeople own it, then they can do what they want with it. If the dealership owns the data, then they can specify whatever format they want. The disadvantages to allowing different ways of keeping the data are inconsistent quality, missing data, difficulty of accessing common data, duplicated data, and so on.

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