What is Master Data Management?
Master Data Management is the collaboration between Business and IT through which they guarantee the uniformity, accuracy, integrity, semantic consistency, and accountability of the company’s shared master data sets. In short, it is a method to safeguard the uniformity, accuracy, ownership, and consistency of the data within an organization. What advantages does that offer to your business?
The new MDM mantras
To be able to react quickly to changes in the market, your conduct of business or commercial strategy, you must let go of outdated ideas about data management, such as control and rigid requirements. What organizations need is flexibility and speed in experimenting, examining, and using the data they need to continue to get good results. However, current Master Data Management practices are sluggish, costly, and complicated.
The new mantras for Master Data Management are therefore:
- Speed
- Quality
- Self-service
It is time to convert data into value on the work floor. Data provide a sharp picture of what your customers are looking for through various channels and in the various stages of their customer journey. This makes it easier for you to see whether you are actually offering the right service.
Innovation of Master Data Management tooling and best practices create new possibilities to facilitate the tasks of your employees in the front line of the organization, to transform data yourself and in this way get ahead of the competition.
Master Data Management provides your business with more valuable data
There are data galore. But how good are they? With high-quality data, marketeers, business developers and senior managers generate new business models to pull in new orders and serve customers as well as possible. Such data can also offer much more than only reports about what has already happened.
Unreliable data may give you the wrong picture of your customers which means you will not be able to serve them in the best possible way. Data quality management unites the interests of governance and compliance with the needs of marketeers and business executives. The aim should be to meet the rules of compliance legislation, take decisions more quickly and apply new, ever advancing data insights and thus assure better customer experience.
Successful businesses have learned to deploy the possibilities of data management to create a flexible organization. However, flexibility does not mean you can avoid data governance. It means you need to invest in data governance to better measure and control performance. With the right basis, employees can get started themselves on the work floor.
Manage your data with an MDM platform and support your business data strategy
When you set up an MDM platform, you do not start with the technology but with a plan. First discover how you can use data to achieve strategic goals. It is important that employees at all levels of the organization have the insights they need to be able to do their work better and serve customers better, for instance by making use of the data possibilities that help to unite the front and back office and link them flexibly to a variety of information channels.
Build up your business case using business data such as turnover and profitability rather than total ownership costs. Work out your plan with the intention of becoming a digital business. Draw up a roadmap that ensures that your colleagues are consistently provided with accurate and usable business data. Use design thinking to narrow the gap between business professionals and data.
- Make personas of your users: determine what they need to capitalize on data.
- Make it clear what steps need to be taken towards data maturity to be able to carry out the strategic plan.
- Only then should you take on the technology. Master Data Management is a business subject; it is not just a matter of selecting the right tool.
What is the risk if MDM is not in order?
Digitization of markets means that in practice everyone has increasing volumes of data at their disposal. Customers, employees, partners, executives; everyone is connected and is encouraged to share information. This open and ’always on’ and ’always ready’ ecosystem demands secure access to reliable data. From experience we know that the following bottlenecks may occur:
- Data is not available quickly enough.
- Current systems cannot cope with data quantity and diversity.
- Market conditions demand a full 360–degree view of a customer.
- Existing systems and processes are not fast enough.
- Compliance requirements are getting stricter, and so are data privacy rules.
To make optimum use of data, the first step is to enable employees to work with data. Tooling and processes should be such that this can be done securely, reliably, and quickly.
