Making Data Concise And Consistent Is A Key Challenge In MDM

Kamal Sharma, CIO, Mindlance, in conversation with Biztech2.com explains how enterprises can effectively leverage MDM to help improve business efficiency. He also gets talking about overcoming the challenges around MDM.

How can MDM help 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 into 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.

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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.

What are some of the key challenges around 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 the 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. Systems and processes are required to maintain this data.

What is your take on MDM-as-a-Service?

Recent movement towards Service Oriented Architecture (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 faster deployments.

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 in the banking vertical.