August 19, 2020
Deanna Nole, Director – Solution Offerings/Marketing
Your master data is a strategic business asset — so make sure you’re treating it that way. That means you should be demanding (or providing!) concise enterprise data metrics to measure MDM program effectiveness.
However, simply relying on data warehouses to extract meaningful master data insights can obscure the important dimensions that measure your data management program’s true return on investment. The best source of your important metrics is right in your MDM hub.
Here are the five key MDM metrics you should be tracking:
#1: How good is your source data? Is your data quality improving? If not, what are the contributing sources of bad quality?
Quality snapshots are easy to get. But to understand if data quality is improving and sustaining, you need a history of the original source records. From there, you can accurately identify where data quality issues are originating — and take steps to fix them.
#2: How current is your data? Is your data timely enough to support essential operations and analytics?
Your MDM data may include records that have not been updated for more than ten years or are for deceased individuals. Maintaining irrelevant data can bog down operational performance, skew quality metrics, and generate unnecessary manual review work for data stewards. It is important to focus efforts on high value, current data. You should be working with your team to determine what is OK to purge.
#3: How useful is your data? Can you more efficiently automate your data decisions without impacting quality?
Over time, as MDM collects history on how data stewards make decisions on “same person, different person,” intelligent analytics applied against those past decisions can help you automate future data decisions with confidence and reduce manual cost and efforts. Do you have a place where you can access historical task decisions?
#4: How complete is your data? Would data enrichment really benefit your data?
Data enrichment services are popping up everywhere these days, and the lure of enriching or augmenting incomplete data sets is enticing. To be sure that an investment in data enrichment has any impact on master data sets, you first need to profile your master data composition and quality. Otherwise, you risk signing up for expensive data subscription services that yield little impact.
#5: How accurate is your data? Is your master data as accurate as it could be?
Accuracy matters and incorrect data breeds mistrust and hesitation to use the data for mission-critical initiatives. To reinforce confidence in master data across all stakeholders and potential consumers, you need metrics that demonstrate improvements over time or acknowledge suspected challenges to consuming stakeholders. Then document the steps you are taking to overcome these challenges.
These metrics have been hard to measure!
To be honest, until now these metrics have been difficult to produce from operational MDM solutions, for several reasons:
- Operational MDM data is not readily accessible by analytics and BI tools
- The complex data model in MDM is engineered for speed of matching and linking — it is not designed for analytic-style reporting
- Historical data decisions are not saved in the operational MDM data, making it impossible to report on trends
- Focused data quality analysis by source system can be complex to achieve in a combined data set
- High-level data accuracy metrics may not be easily explained with drill-down data to build trust in the metrics
Get the insights you need now by using Insight:ID™
IMT developed Insight:ID to allow you to measure all the important metrics of your MDM system. If you are responsible for your MDM program, you need Insight:ID™ to deliver the metrics your stakeholders have been asking for and to demonstrate the value of your MDM programs.
Insight:ID™ is a comprehensive analytics and reporting framework for master data that is always 100% up to date with your operational data in IBM InfoSphere MDM Standard Edition. It retains entity resolution outcomes needed for trend analysis and to measure program effectiveness.
Insight:ID™ gives decision makers a clear view into master data composition, quality, and performance with a full data foundation suitable for sharing data with other stakeholders and analytics programs. Give your stakeholders access to pre-packaged dashboards summarizing the most requested enterprise metrics or use your own visualization tool with the data platform. Targeted insights help you understand how current your data is and makes it easy to identify data to archive or purge.
See how Insight:ID helps you track the most important MDM metrics.
To learn more, check out our Insight:ID web page or email sales@imt.ca.
