Those of us that work around or manage the day to day operations of an MDM, data governance, or data cleansing projects understand the challenges and efforts needed to transform “raw” data though multiple stages of analytics and processes to achieve information quality to be used in our customer’s CRM, CMMS, PIM and ERP systems. The result of an un-cleansed product record can cause a production line to stay off line because an inventory item wasn’t ordered due to incomplete information or added inventory cost of ordering an incorrect item (we can be talking about a $10,000 motor) or multiple entries and setups in the material master due to data duplication.
Data vs. Information definition: to simplify the concept, data is managed by a combination of a team of analysts and software to achieve the goal of a cleansed record or useable information. Data is imported and profiled, classified, structured, verified, enriched, translated and reports generated; we create useable information from low quality data for use in decision making related to engineering, purchasing, maintenance, marketing, sales, etc. The data that is exported into client systems is information that will meet a predetermined set of data governance rules and information quality requirements.
Data Quality Experts, let have a discussion on the definitions of data quality, does an address or a product detail meet the requirement if only classified? Or should verification at source (contact for address or manufacturer / supplier for product) be required at initial setup of the data in the system or maintenance scheduled as part of the data governance program? Is the data incomplete? Does the MDM process include a question / answer scenario to complete the data?
MDM software designers and developers can we also have a discussion on the software’s ease of use to manage the stages of data cleansing to support a MDM philosophy and using advanced techniques to automate the management, add intelligence in processing data imports, workflows and data cleansing stages of classifying, profiling, matching, translation, data audit analytics, exception reports and status reporting of a data record?
I believe these are great discussion points and will serve as great blog topics.
