Why master data management is key to digital transformation
Enterprise architecture is often seen as esoteric: It’s nice to have, yet generally considered somewhat removed from your day-to-day operations. But this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Thanks to digital transformation, your organization likely has a number of different systems, all of which should communicate with one another. A customer can’t mean one thing in your customer-facing system and a completely different thing in your billing system. This is where good enterprise architecture comes into play, as it enables you to have a common language across your organization.
How do you ensure quality enterprise architecture? It starts with master data management (MDM).
Maintaining data in multiple systems without an MDM solution requires users to manually input data into different systems to keep them running and updated across the organization. This can lead to inconsistencies.
Take customer data, for example. Say you have Customer A residing in multiple systems. Some might input “Customer A,” into one system, while others might use “customer a” in a different system. Over time, irregularities are bound to arise, and eventually, the quality of information will degrade.
This is just one customer; imagine facing this challenge with all of your customers.
We encountered this very situation ourselves. We were moving to Software-as-a-Service and we needed to ensure that our SaaS applications could talk to all the different parts of our organization, as well as pass data to other SaaS providers we were using.
The only way to make all of this happen was to go back and look at our MDM with a specific focus on customers and contracts.
Where were we going to manage customers? This was the first question we asked ourselves.
After initially managing customers in three different systems, we realized the best course of action was to manage everything in a single system with centralized ownership of the data and start putting MDM around that customer entity.
Since our customer’s information showed up as one name in one system and a different name in another, we realized it was going to be difficult to integrate all of this data. We now faced the tall order of making sure there was a single view of each customer and it was the same no matter what system it appeared in.
