A sound analytical strategy encourages activity and embraces a self-service methodology but also provides guidance and oversight from those close to the data. This governance will be instrumental in preventing data quality issues, superfluous analyses and misguided decisions. Enter master data management (MDM). The technologies and processes underlying a typical MDM strategy not only provide oversight and access control, but also enable companies to track the origin and lineage of data to ensure safety and consistency in the decision process.Â
While data governance may have once been viewed as unnecessary or burdensome red tape, it is now seen as an opportunity to pave the way for effective analytics. The first wave of enterprise business intelligence (BI) was effective in gathering and processing data for better visual rendering via reports or dashboards, insights that would typically be served up to an executive in a position to act on it immediately. Almost exclusively owned and operated by the IT department and those close to the data, this process could be managed and tracked fairly easily but suffered from a lack of agility and breadth of usage. The next wave focused very specifically on agility and self-service usage of analytics. Companies needed a way to enable their most curious and critical decision makers with fact-based insight, whether or not these were technically inclined people. The problem, in some cases, was that this widespread analytical activity created issues like data duplication from different business units, multiple interpretations of the same information, competing analyses, and erroneous decisions as a result.
Recognizing the value of pervasive analytical activity in combination with proper supervision, companies today want to have their cake and eat it too. By marrying analytics with a foundation of governance and oversight through the use of MDM, companies are actually finding a greater level of satisfaction in their users. From the senior executive to the mid-level manager, these non-technical decision makers are more satisfied with data quality, their ability to access and share information, and the overall ease-of-use of their data systems (Figure 1).
Governance and strong oversight isn't just about a check box on a corporate compliance report however. The data above demonstrates how this type of environment helps foster trust among end-users leading to a higher overall level of satisfaction.
