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May 17, 2009

MDM - Does it have a clear Value Proposition?

Last week I presented a paper on Master Data Management Best Practices at OAUG Collaborate 09 in Orlando, Florida. In a couple of recent projects involving data management, I found that the difficulty was mostly in making clear to senior management that investment in the quality of their master data repositories was not simply to increase or consolidate the number of new entries (customers, suppliers, parts, etc), but rather to ensure that existing data was properly managed.

Data Quality
The problem of building confidence in master data repositories starts and ends with data quality. The value proposition to senior managers is that clean, consistent and validated master data can increase the overall value to the organization from data mining to business intelligence. Investing in these latter projects without high quality master data can increase the costs of such projects, render them obsolete as original master data is cleaned up, or even provide misleading or erroneous results due to incorrect assumptions. Using a risk management framework to define areas where master data is at risk can help identify 'high value' areas where effort can be applied with good returns. Then develop data quality initiatives to gain traction on the initial clean up effort. Afterwards, consider using six sigma principals to drive a continuing commitment to data quality and increase the value of master data repositories.

Posted by alexfiteni at May 17, 2009 12:44 PM

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