Businesses are swimming in an ocean of information. This abundance of data is a double-edged sword – it can either drive innovation and growth or lead to chaos and inefficiency. To navigate this sea of data effectively, organizations need a comprehensive data governance strategy. Two prominent approaches in this regard are defensive data governance and offensive data governance.
Recently, renowned analyst firm released its first event Market Guide for Master Data Management Solutions. It features solution overviews (like ours), must-have features (guess who has them all), rankings (spoiler alert: we're a pack leader), and Gartner's recommendations for data leaders considering a purchase.
Here’s our take on the key takeaways from this inaugural guide.
Microsoft has taken a significant step in the world of data governance by launching a free version of Microsoft Purview (currently in preview). This new offering is designed to make data governance and management more accessible to organizations of all sizes. Let’s take a look at what the free version offers, and explore the implications for master data management.
Traditional upfront data modeling in MDM involves the creation of a comprehensive data model that defines the structure, relationships, and constraints of master data entities. This approach requires a thorough understanding of the business domain, data requirements, and anticipated data usage scenarios. The key characteristics of traditional upfront data modeling include:
At this year’s Microsoft Build event, Microsoft announced Microsoft Fabric - its brand-new data and analytics offering. In this article, we’ll outline what Fabric is, its key features, and how you can elevate Fabric’s capabilities with fully integrated, high-quality data from CluedIn.
In the world of data management, businesses face the challenge of efficiently handling vast amounts of information. Traditional relational databases have been the go-to solution for many years, but the rise of graph databases has introduced a compelling alternative, especially when it comes to managing master data.
In this article, we will explore the key differences between graph and relational databases and discuss why graph databases are particularly well-suited for master data management.
Relational databases have long been the standard choice for storing structured data. They organize data into tables with predefined schemas, where relationships between tables are established through primary and foreign keys. Relational databases excel at managing transactional data and complex queries involving multiple tables.
On the other hand, graph databases are designed to store and manage highly connected data. They use a network-like structure composed of nodes (entities) and edges (relationships) to represent data relationships. Graph databases prioritize relationships as first-class citizens, making it easier to model and traverse complex connections between entities.
Master Data Management focuses on creating a single, consistent, and reliable version of key data entities within an organization. This includes customer information, product catalogs, employee records, and other critical data elements. The challenges in MDM stem from the need to handle vast amounts of interconnected data and maintain data integrity across multiple systems and business units.
1. Relationship-Centric Model
Graph databases inherently prioritize relationships, making them ideal for managing complex interconnections within master data. Integrating data using a Graph-based MDM system is much easier and quicker than one which uses a relational database, because the Graph will naturally find connections between the data that would be impossible for you to stipulate or discover on your own.
This is particularly beneficial for a number of use cases, such as building a single customer view. To be effective, a single customer view must aggregate data from various touchpoints and channels to create a holistic profile. This means integrating both unstructured and structured data from a number of source systems and applications and finding the relationships between them. This is simply not achievable using a relational database with pre-prescribed schemas and relationships.
Master Data Management (MDM) is the process of creating and maintaining a single, accurate, and consistent source of information for an organization's critical data entities such as customers, products, suppliers, and patients. In the life sciences and pharmaceutical industries, MDM is especially important due to the ever-increasing amount of data that needs to be stored, managed, and used to drive better commercial outcomes.
In this article, we will explore the benefits of master data management in the life sciences and pharmaceutical industries, including how MDM can improve data quality, enhance operational efficiency, and support regulatory compliance.
As the volume and variety of data continue to grow, organizations face the challenge of effectively managing and utilizing all of their data assets for maximum business impact. Several solutions have emerged to address this challenge, including Data Lakes, Data Warehouses, Data Lakehouses, and Master Data Management (MDM) platforms.
Master Data Management (MDM) is the process of maintaining a central repository - or single source of truth - of an organization's critical data, which includes customer data, product data, and other key data entities. The data is often scattered across multiple systems and applications, and MDM helps organizations to consolidate and manage this data effectively.
As organizations have embraced digital transformation in order to better serve their customers and enhance operations, this reliable supply of high-quality, accurate, and accessible data has become even more desirable. The problem, however, is that in many cases MDM has never quite lived up to the promise of delivering it.
That said, there are areas in which the use of AI can dramatically improve the speed, cost, and ease of preparing data for ubiquitous use across an organization. As advanced as an MDM platform may be, there is no doubt that AI is a force accelerator when it comes to mastering data. Here are just a few examples of the potential application of AI in MDM:
As previously mentioned, some MDM vendors have already built their own AI engines as part of their MDM offerings. The issue with this is that their models will never be as powerful or comprehensive as dedicated AI platforms like OpenAI, Google AI, and IBM’s Watson. Developing a high-quality AI engine requires significant expertise in machine learning, data processing, and software engineering. It is also a time-consuming and expensive exercise. Although MDM vendors may have some of the required specialisms and investment capacity at their disposal, AI is not their core focus, which is why in most cases they are better off partnering with AI vendors or utilizing existing AI platforms to provide their customers with the best experience.
It’s an exciting time for the technology industry as AI gains momentum and starts to show exactly what it is capable of. At the moment, we have only witnessed a fraction of what AI can bring to the data management industry as whole, and MDM in particular. Without a doubt, AI will bring about a major transformation in how we prepare data to deliver insight in the future, and once its potential is realized the way we master data will be changed forever.
Master Data Management (MDM) is a crucial process for many industries, including insurance. MDM involves the creation and management of a central repository of master data, which is used to support a wide range of business processes and decision-making activities. In the insurance industry, MDM is particularly important because of the large amount of data that insurers must manage in order to accurately assess risks, underwrite policies, and settle claims.
MDM plays a critical role in the insurance industry by providing a single source of high-quality data that can be used to support a range of business processes. This includes:
Currently, the biggest opportunity in MDM for insurance companies is the ability to organize data in new and innovative ways to enable advanced analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and cognitive learning systems. Data-driven organizations are already using MDM architectures to “future-proof” their business by anticipating customer expectations and streamlining operations.
For example, CX management is the source of organic revenue growth for many insurers, and a modern MDM system can take the art and science of managing customer relationships to new levels. By consolidating data from individual policies and aggregating them into a customer/household view, or golden record, insurers can:
Diving a little deeper, once an MDM solution is in place, insurance firms benefit in a number of ways:
Data Quality: Insurance data can be complex and difficult to manage, with a wide range of data sources and formats. While traditional MDM systems have struggled to cope with semi-structured and unstructured data, augmented platforms such as CluedIn are capable of ingesting poor quality data in almost any format in order to consolidate, clean and enrich the data ready for use.
Data Integration: Insurance data is often siloed in different systems and databases, which can make it difficult to integrate this data into a single MDM repository. Historically, this would require significant data mapping and integration efforts. However, more advanced systems like CluedIn can easily cope with hundreds of different data sources.
Governance: MDM requires strong governance to ensure that the data is managed effectively and efficiently. This includes establishing clear policies and procedures for data management, as well as providing ongoing training and support to employees. A popular option for many organizations is to use a data governance platform in conjunction with an MDM system in order to ensure that data is handled in accordance with the governance standards set as well as being easily accessible and usable by business users in various teams.
Cost: Implementing a traditional MDM system is a costly endeavour, requiring significant investments in software, hardware, and personnel. The need to model and map data beforehand also added months to the length of time taken to realize any value from these investments. All of this has changed with the advent of augmented MDM systems which remove the need for upfront data modelling and use modern technologies like Graph to allow the natural relationships between the data to emerge. Contemporary MDM systems are also Cloud-native, which means that they offer the advantages of both scale and efficiency inherent to the Cloud.
Despite the obvious benefits of MDM, the barriers of traditional approaches have, until now, prevented many insurers from investing in this technology. With many of those hurdles now cleared, the path has opened up for insurers who want to use their data to fuel the insights and innovations they need to remain competitive and profitable. Improvements in business processes, streamlining operations, and managing risk are all vital to the success of an insurance provider, and MDM provides the foundation of trusted, business-ready data that enables them.