As databases grow larger and larger and financial companies become more responsible for documentation and information storage, you will probably start hearing a lot about master data management. Master data management is the data management discipline of identifying all of the organization’s critical data and placing rules and controls around it so that embarrassing and costly errors do not occur.
The first step an organization will take in implementing master data management is to identify all of the organization’s critical data. This can be a difficult task, as many departments view some data as worthless while another departments will think it is the most important. It is important to bring everyone across the organization together to find a consensus on what the most critical data actually is. Once this is done, work needs to be performed to analyze how people are using this data and to ensure there are no conflicting uses.
The next step is to put standard definitions around this data and see if anyone falls outside of those definitions. If someone is using the data in a way that is inconsistent with the standard definition, that must be corrected. Because master data management usually has executive support, it is usually not difficult to get an out-of-line manager back in-line.
Once the critical data is identified, you next thing to focus on is putting controls around the data to ensure that going forward corrupt and inaccurate data stays out. This can be done by working with all of the business leaders to develop business rules that are controlled by software systems and master data management tools so that bad data never enters the system in the first place.
As you can see, master data management is critical when you’re dealing with a large amount of data. Finance companies deal with massive amounts of data, and thus MDM is critical.
>
Share This To Your Bookmark :)
Tags: Data Management, Finance, Tools