Integrating Multiple Sources Of Data Critical For Accurate Master Data

What is the role of MDM in improving business efficiency?

Every organisation wants to give best customer service and that becomes a challenge when a considerable amount of time and budget is consumed in trying to determine how to make processes faster, better and more effective. A lot of time goes in production lines and integration processes. Automating master data will eliminate these problems.

An MDM solution calculates the current procedures and provides realistic recommendations that can be immediately implemented within a team. Good master data management can provide very clear, concise and consistent data to support business processes and decision-making.

There should be a central focus for establishing and documenting enterprise policies, procedures and standards. The same focus should be applied while handling data resources that help align business data requirements with the data management infrastructure.

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What are some of the specific challenges that enterprises face with respect to MDM projects?

The greatest challenge comes from the business process changes and process integration issues, over and above the data integration requirement, which makes it necessary to identify and resolve the key challenges around MDM.

Some key challenges that need to be addressed include making data more concise and consistent. Even if the master data has no errors, some organisations have only one set of master data thus companies should go for data deduplication technologies. Currently the challenge with adoption of data deduplication is the wrong implementation mechanism.

Another challenge is around consolidation of multiple databases into one master data To get to that stage, companies have to consolidate discreet databases into one master data. It’s imperative to judge the accuracy of the data from multiple sources to be finally entered into the master data.

Maintaining a high-quality, consistent set of master data for your organisation is rapidly becoming a necessity. The systems and processes are required to maintain this data.

What are your views on MDM-as-a-Service?

Recent movement towards Service Oriented Architechture (SOA) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) make MDM-as-a-Service a very critical issue. Cloud computing benefits are very high for a large number of organisations, which include significant cost savings, increased flexibility, and fast deployments.

Cost advantages include paying for what you use. This is very critical for organisations with variable or seasonal usage. Companies don’t have to invest to support peak computing periods. Costs become more predictable and controllable. Increased agility includes access to the latest technology and experts without making significant up front investments.

This holds true for master data too, where the expertise of the cloud service provider can be leveraged at a relatively lower cost than handling master data in house. However the concerns around security are still holding companies to go for MDM-as-a-Service especially for the banking vertical.