The Master of Your Data: Why it is Crucial for Business Success

Data is the lifeblood of any organization, but simply having data isn't enough. Master data management is a critical yet often underestimated aspect of any organization’s digital transformation journey. Effective master data management ensures information is accurate, accessible, and used efficiently to enable operational excellence, drive sound decisions and overall business success.

Two Key Data Types Play a Vital Role

Transactional Data: covers the dynamic, day-to-day flow of information like sales orders, customers interactions, and financial transactions. Transactional data gets captured in the various systems and where information constantly evolves and organically changes over time.

Master Data: consists of the foundational data that sets the parameters for the organization single source of truth (golden records) and define how information accurately flows throughout the organization. This includes customer master data, product and item master data, supplier and vendor master data, employee master data, among others. Example, setting up new customer in the system and defining the customer’s name, address, pricing parameters or whatever the case may be. Master data might change from time to time but is more static as compared to transactional data.

Organizations, especially new and rapidly growing ones, often underestimate the impact of allowing multiple people to modify master data without proper governance. Carefully designed governance over who can access and change master data helps maintain its integrity, as incorrect entries can disrupt various organizational processes and impact customers and business services. Large organizations often face challenges managing data across multiple systems, and master data management tackles this by establishing clear ownership, processes, and a single source of truth.

Carefully designed governance over who can access and change master data helps maintain its integrity.

For instance, when a Sales Representative makes a sales, the process usually triggers a series of actions across various CRM, ERP and Payroll systems: sales order placement, order picking, packing, delivery, invoice generation, payment collection, sales commission compensation, and so on. Understanding how data flow between systems is crucial to ensure consistency and to avoid the ripple effect of errors throughout various processes, services, and business sections. Imagine a scenario where customer's address and invoicing details in the sales system differs from the one in the order processing and financial system. This can lead to missed deliveries, frustrated customers, extra cost and wasted resources.

Beyond Technology, The Human Factor

Data is meaningless if it is not clean and reliable, and while technology undeniably plays a crucial role, successful data management goes beyond just the systems and tools.? Importantly and often underestimated, it is about how people manage data effectively and how the processes interact with these systems.

Key Pillars of Success

Successful master data management involves several key components: clear roles and responsibilities to define who owns and is accountable for maintaining the accuracy of master data; business rules and policies to set guidelines for managing the golden records; a data dictionary to establish a common language for data definitions and to capture the master data type, format, size, and other parameters; data integration rules to define how data from different systems will be merged, transformed, and consumed; data quality rules to monitor and improve data quality, including data audits and preventative measures; and data metrics to establish key performance indicators to track the effectiveness of master data management.

Human expertise is the invincible force that drives successful master data management.

By identifying the “Master of Your Data”, ensuring the appropriate governance, and adopting these principles, organizations can unlock the full potential of their data, fostering streamlined operations, better decision-making, and a significant competitive advantage. While technology helps in laying the foundation and connecting the dots, human expertise is the invincible force that drives successful master data management. By leveraging the combined power of master data expertise, governance, and business understanding, organizations can unlock the true potential of their data and systems, ensuring a smooth and efficient data flow that propels them towards success.

DISCLAIMER

All views expressed are solely the author and do not directly or indirectly express the views and or opinions of any employer, organization and or entity with which the author is affiliated with.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Ahmad Mourad is a senior business technology, FMCG / retail, healthcare, and telecom executive driving business growth, ingraining innovation at scale, shaping and transforming business and digital ecosystems through ethical leadership, talents development and engagement, diverse thinking and inclusion, customer centricity, stakeholders’ engagement, internal and external partnerships.