Your data, when all put together, paints the full picture of your business. If you’re missing data, or that information is incorrect, outdated, or broken, then that image inevitably gets distorted.
At least, that’s how your analytical, Artificial intelligence, and other automating systems see it. Sure, they can fill in the gaps, but they will inevitably be making stuff up or working with incomplete datasets.
In short, if you are missing data, don’t know where it is, or find it difficult to put it all together, then you’re working with a shaky foundation. Master Data Governance (MDG) software works to patch those cracks in your foundation by centralizing your data, and making it easier to manage all your master data at once. How does MDG do all that? This system works to:
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Create a framework of data policies
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Set the processes on how data is used
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Creates data rules to ensure accuracy
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Helps increase consistency
With MDG, you can access all of your essential information, remove inconsistent or inaccurate bits of information, and improve all operations.
What is Master Data?
MDG works to manage your data, particularly your master data. What is master data, you might ask? It’s all the information that’s absolutely essential to your operations. If you were to look at the information you keep track of, your master data is the portion of it that you absolutely need to operate.
What your master data looks like will depend entirely on your business type. In general, however, you can expect it to include:
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Customer Data: Things like their names, contact details, and even purchase history are essential for sales, operations, and marketing.
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Product Data: Everything from product images, descriptions, pricing, and inventory levels are needed to maintain smooth operations.
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Operational Data: The supply chain is a big, messy collection of different players, and you need all of their information in order to get products or even services from point A to point B.
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Employee Data: You need to have all the names, contact details, job titles, and even login credentials of your employees.
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Supplier Data: Just as you need all the details on your employees to manage them properly, you also need to keep track of all your suppliers, including payment terms and historical data so you know the cost-value benefit.
Top 5 Reasons Why You Need Master Data Governance
There are four main reasons why your business needs an MDG solution at work.
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Avoid Wasting Your Resources
When data isn’t properly kept up to date, especially if it’s because one system says one thing, and another says another, you’re bound to run into problems. For example, say your customer changes their email address preference. If your sales team gets that update, but your marketing team doesn’t, you’ll end up wasting money advertising to an address that’s been abandoned.
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Improve Decision-Making
When there’s inconsistencies in your data, analytics, insights, and more are simply not going to be as in-depth or even as effective as you want them to be. You never want to work with missing data, as this can immediately lead to poor decision making or even missing opportunities. With an MDG system, all your data is centralized, organized, and ready to work with your analytical tools.
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Stay Compliant
Many businesses need to work with regulatory bodies. This may be privacy-related, for example, or perhaps be license-related. Regardless, you need to stay compliant at all times. With an MDG system, you can make sure that all of your data complies with those regulations.
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Boost Customer Satisfaction
Personalization is a very important in managing a happy network of customers, and a well-implemented MDG system can make that happen. To offer personalization, you need all your master data sorted and organized so that automation tools can take the latest information and provide key recommendations your customers are sure to enjoy.
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Improve Your Cybersecurity
MDG can also help boost your cybersecurity efforts. When all of your data is in one place and being structured with an MDG, you can easily implement a robust, consistent set of cybersecurity protocols that apply to every corner of your business. If you use multiple systems, then you need to use multiple security strategies. With one MDG framework, you can focus all your efforts on just one.
What You Need to Build a Successful Master Data Governance Framework
Every MDG system has three main focuses: data consolidation, data governance, and then finally, data quality management. Before you get into building such a framework for your own business, it’s important you know the key elements that make up every successful MDG framework:
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Data Stewardship
Improving the quality and accuracy of data, quite frankly, cannot be automated – at least, not entirely. That’s why it’s important to assign a data steward. This person works to define data standards so that information is consistent across their data domain (like customer data). This means that a single metadata system is used, outlining which formats are allowed, and other important rules that helps data stay consistent.
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Data Standardization
There are many ways to describe a flower. The same applies to concepts in your business. A customer’s data might be referred to as a Customer ID in one department, and then in others a Client ID, despite the information being the same. With MDG, you create clear, concise rules on how data is labelled and sorted so that employees across departments and even offices are working with the same information.
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Data Quality Management
There are many reasons why your data’s quality might slip. Poor quality data, incomplete datasets, inaccuracies – the list goes on. With MDG, you work on identifying, and then fixing inaccuracies. This is done by defining data quality metrics and setting up cleansing routines. It will take a while to clean up your existing data, but using MDG can help you improve data quality from fresh sources immediately.
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Data Security
Having all of your data security centralized and properly sorted so you can see and know where everything is makes it so much easier to secure. You can even establish robust security measures in your MDG system to help minimize issues like unauthorized access or edits.
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Data Access
How your MDG system can be used to secure your data is by creating user access rules. This means that you can set who can see documents, who can edit them, and who can add or delete them. This can be done on a person-to-person basis, or it can be done by attaching user access limits to job role titles.
Building Your Own MDG Framework
An MDG framework is a three-pillar setup that requires you to centralize your data, organize it, and then manage it. Software can be used to help you through this process, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t work for humans to do. To start, you’ll need to get a full stock of your current data setup and mark where it all is. From there, you’ll need to define your goals, identify key stakeholders that will need to work on building this framework, and then build a robust policy.
Only once all that legwork is done can you then start using good-old tech to get the job done. Just remember that humans need to oversee the whole process, with your new policies in mind, so that your system works smoothly.
