As more attention is being given to master data management (MDM), also known as a golden record, it is important to remember it arose out of the necessity for businesses to improve the consistency and quality of their key data assets, such as product data, asset data, customer data, location data, etc.

Master data is a key organizational data asset that contains the most up-to-date and accurate information for day-to-day business operations. It supports transactional, non-transactional or analytical data and is usually shared across departments to help personnel conduct analytics and make decisions around service, sales, marketing and other areas.

The benefits of the MDM paradigm increase as the number and diversity of organizational departments, worker roles and computing applications expand. For this reason, MDM is more likely to be of value to large or complex enterprises than to small, medium-sized or simple ones. When companies merge, the implementation of MDM can minimize confusion and optimize the efficiency of the new, larger organization.

At the very basic level, MDM eliminates redundant and inconsistent versions of the same data in your organization. Companies today struggle to become more agile by implementing information systems that support and facilitate changing business requirements. As a result, the management of information about products, customers, etc. has become increasingly important.

Efficient MDM gives an organization a single place to have an authoritative view of information, which in turn eliminates costly redundancies that occur when organizations rely upon multiple versions of data distributed across siloed systems. For instance, if a customer’s information has changed, the organization will update the master data with the new information and not turn towards driving sales and marketing efforts using the old data point present in other systems. 

While it is simple to enumerate the various master data entity types, it is sometimes more challenging to decide which data items in a company should be treated as master data. Sometimes data that does not normally comply with the definition for master data may need to be managed as such and data that does comply with the definition may not.

At the end of the day, content needs to be findable and, that happens with a strong, standards-based taxonomy. Data Harmony is our patented, award winning, artificial intelligence (AI) suite that leverages explainable AI for efficient, innovative and precise semantic discovery of your new and emerging concepts to help you find the information you need when you need it.

Melody K. Smith

Data Harmony is an award-winning semantic suite that leverages explainable AI.

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the intelligence and the technology behind world-class explainable AI solutions.