How MDM can you help remove the single biggest blockage to GDPR Compliance.

It is hard to overstate the power of Master Data Management (MDM) thinking and structures in enabling enterprises around the globe to achieve sustainable GDPR compliance. Let me explain why I say this.

GDPR is all about protecting the personal information of individuals who do business with an enterprise. On the surface, this should be a relatively simple thing to do. However, due to the proliferation of commercial off-the-shelf systems in enterprises globally and the amount of replication and fragmentation that this has created with individuals’ information, this is now a major challenge.

Even Committed Enterprises Can Get It Wrong

Even in those enterprises that are committed to achieving GDPR compliance, the current silo structures and systems within organisations make GDPR almost impossible to achieve.

Why is this? In these enterprises, each department has its own systems that hold information on Individuals. What happens is that each department now goes through their systems and carries out a process of data clean up, removing duplication, documenting maintenance processes and security access, as shown in the table below.

The above approach, no matter how thoroughly it is done, has a major flaw in that it assumes that each of these groups is mutually exclusive. This is definitely not the case in most enterprises around the globe. Because of this false assumption, there will still be loads of fragmentation and replication and, consequently, lots of data errors across the enterprise as a whole. This approach makes it almost impossible to achieve GDPR compliance, in spite of the best efforts of the dedicated GDPR teams.

What Would MDM Do Differently?

Using MDM thinking and MDM structures enables an enterprise to make the quantum leap and realise that an enterprise does NOT actually hold information on Customers, Prospects, Suppliers, etc. Rather it holds information on INDIVIDUALS who are playing the Roles of ‘Customer’, ‘Prospect’, ‘Supplier’, etc. in their relationships with the enterprise.

Once an enterprise makes this breakthrough, it then becomes so obvious that an individual’s information should be created once and only once and then used as often as required for each Role that an Individual plays with the business.

It is the current unnecessary replication of an Individual’s information across an enterprise that is the single biggest obstacle to GDPR compliance.

MDM GDPR Webinar

I will be running a webinar on 30 January 2018 at 11am PST in which I will go through in detail the very powerful MDM structures that can enable enterprises to make this quantum shift in their thinking and practices.

You might think that such an approach is all very good in theory but could not possibly be implemented in any operational enterprise. However, this is not the case as I will show by an example of where it has been achieved in a fully operational enterprise with 25,000 branches managing relationships with 250,000,000 individuals.

Click here to find out more and book your seat.

Spread The Word and Help a Friend

If you know of any friends or colleagues who have been tasked with achieving GDPR for their enterprise, then please share the link to this Webinar with them. They will thank you for it.