Every larger organization hosts a myriad of business applications, each with its own database holding conflicting corporate information assets about customers, products, suppliers or facilities, etc. Corporate restructuring, M&A activities, stricter compliance requirements, new business models and maverick data silos provide further data quality challenges.

Yet, high-quality data is a strategic asset for most modern organizations and provides the lifeblood for successful sales and marketing activities, regulatory compliance and customer experience management. Quality data often separates leading players from laggards. The single view of critical corporate data therefore requires a dedicated, cross-functional effort.

Business leaders may well view data as a strategic asset, but very few organizations have actually adopted data harmonization solutions. To overcome hesitations around ROI and complexity, it is useful to focus on specific business needs such as customer insight, product management, compliance or vendor spend analysis. To serve these requirements, producing a ‘gold copy’ of critical data becomes a key imperative.

Most companies struggle with their attempts to gain a single view of customers, products or suppliers, as data is siloed in many disparate systems. Worse still is the fact that data is invariably duplicated, with no way of knowing which information is most up-to-date.

Yet having a single version of the truth is imperative. Without it customer service suffers, cross-selling and up-selling effort is ineffective; and regulatory compliance is compromised. As a result, it’s no surprise that Master Data Management (MDM) – the organization, management and distribution of accurate, up-to-date critical data – is among the highest priorities for companies across all major industries. Without it decisions are made and plans executed based on poor, incomplete or outdated data, adversely affecting customer service, supply chains or cost-cutting efforts etc.

In order to achieve a single view, data is typically imported into an MDM system from multiple reference sources held across multiple applications, business units and territories in the enterprise. The imported data first goes through a data cleansing, standardization and enrichment process. The data is then transferred into a core MDM system where it goes through processes such as cleansing, de-duplication, and cross-referencing, thereby creating a ‘gold copy’ of data sets stored in the master data hub, available for dissemination across enterprise applications, ensuring standardized quality information across all business units.