Master data management: the lifeblood of your business?
Clean management of data before artificial intelligence
Today, there is a lot of talk about artificial intelligence and data science without realizing that first the fundamental management of existing data must be ensured.
Data forms the basis for most business processes and functions. If the data is inconsistent, redundant, incomplete, outdated, erroneous or simply not available, the company's services can hardly be provided optimally. Carefully managed master data management (MDM) is therefore a critical success factor for every company and becomes the lifeblood.
From a professional point of view, data is also part of knowledge management. Consequently, their existence, retrievability and economization drive both the innovative power and the competitiveness of the company.
High-quality master data as the basis for agile companies
Master data is condition-oriented information of customers, suppliers, products and employees that hardly changes over a longer period of time. They generate business benefits for the company when the well-maintained data is immediately usable and accessible. High quality data increases process quality, supports business decisions and overall increases the agility of the company to respond to change. Master data management is, in a sense, the key to digital transformation; the more data that is reusable, the better digital processes can be implemented, productivity increased and business success enhanced.
Data governance, the framework
Central components of master data management are data governance, data quality, data protection and IT architecture. Data governance is an upstream control to define the handling of data in the organization. It sets standards for how master data is structured and who can use what data and for what purposes. Governance also specifies who is responsible for data quality. This in turn is made up of the criteria accuracy, completeness and timeliness.
How do I ensure data quality?
To keep the data quality as high as possible, it is recommended to measure the quality of the data at regular intervals. The unique identification of a data record is essential. Likewise, the appropriate handling of personal data is crucial for successful master data management.
The right way to deal with data protection
Privacy must always be protected and data misuse prevented. The easier it is to identify a person, the greater the data protection requirements become when collecting and handling the data set. We have published a five-part series of articles on data protection in Switzerland, taking into account the GDPR, on the occasion of the new Data Protection Act 2018.
The right management by means of IT architecture
The last central component of master data management is the IT architecture. This supports the company processes in managing the data with infrastructure, automation and interfaces. As already mentioned at the beginning, the master data system is the lifeblood of the entire company.
With our expertise in data management, architecture, collaboration, integration, development, ICT consulting and project management, linkyard accompanies you through all stages of the introduction of master data management, from data analysis and the development of a data model to data quality control, data integration, data enrichment and data control. linkyard is particularly specialized in technically complex integrations and customers with high demands on information security and data protection. linkyard's information security management system is certified to ISO/IEC 27001:2013. With this set of experience and know-how, we get the lifeblood of your business pulsing again.
