ARTICLES
October 26th, 2022 | 4 min read
What is Augmented Data Management?
There comes a time in every industry when the status quo is challenged. Often this comes in the form of a new market entrant with a vision to improve or fix what was broken about the old way of doing things. Sometimes, they don’t just make things better, they eradicate the problem altogether. Almost always, they advance the industry in the customer’s favour and force traditional providers to evolve in order to keep up.This is what is happening right now in the world of Master Data Management (MDM). For 25 years organisations have had to accept that attempting to put their master data to use in a meaningful way would be expensive, slow, and almost wholly reliant on IT. It’s no wonder then that so many of them either tried and failed to implement MDM, or avoided it altogether. Meanwhile, advances in technology such as Cloud computing, Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) have continued apace, leaving traditional MDM solutions in the metaphorical dust.
All of that is changing with the advent of modern MDM systems. The new breed of MDM is built for the Cloud, enhanced by AI, Graph and/or NLP, and democratizes data for use across the business. In fact, modern MDM systems are so different from their legacy counterparts that in many ways they aren’t MDM systems at all.
Enter Augmented Data Management (ADM). Augmented Data Management utilizes advanced technologies such as Graph, AI and NLP to enhance and automate data management tasks related to quality, governance, preparation and enrichment. The automation piece is crucial as it takes the burden of manual, repetitive tasks away from the data engineering and IT teams, allowing them to focus on creating value. It also means that business users are empowered to use data to drive their own analytics and insight-driven initiatives.
In addition to the obvious simplification and automation benefits, true ADM is Cloud-native and delivers maximum value as part of a Cloud-based, integrated data management ecosystem. Data often lives in multiple complex and siloed systems within an organisation, from ERP platforms, Data Lakes and Data Warehouses to spreadsheets, presentations and PDFs. Many organisations have invested heavily in Business Intelligence (BI) and Analytics tools which rely on a consistent flow of high quality data, but the challenge has been getting the data out of its various repositories and into a state which is usable by these tools. ADM bridges this gap, delivering data that is ready for insight more quickly than ever before.
ADM realises the unfilled promise of what MDM should have been, and in the not too distant future will supersede MDM entirely. Organisations that embrace this advanced approach will finally be able to use their data to shorten product development cycles, accelerate go-to-market plans and maximise revenue-generating opportunities. In the quest to become data-driven, ADM is well on its way to becoming a non-negotiable requirement.
