Well, it’s November and with the air politically charged, we all know what that means. Yup, it’s time for companies to start prepping data in time for the new year.
And there’s a lot of data, isn’t there? According to one estimate, the creation of data over the past 5 years has increased eightfold, and we are now creating 2.5 quintillion bytes each day. Over 90% of the data in the world has been created over the last two years, with very little signs of stopping..
With all these streams of data, companies have been scrambling to organize and make sense out of their stored information. One way to do this is with master data management, which involves centralization of information that is key to business operations. The chief goal of Master Data Management, is to combine data across an enterprise and store it in a single location (a data warehouse) for eventual retrieval and analysis. The data stored in the warehouse is known as the “golden record” or, in some cases, the Single Source of Truth (SSOT). I prefer the latter term as TRUTH is a top priority when performing analytics; data can be different from one location to the next and due to misspellings, misrepresentations, or omissions, and is always a challenge to take bad data and make it look better in the next stage of analysis.
To illustrate a data warehouse model, let’s take some news of the day. Imagine that we store our data in binders. These binders could be filled with anything: portfolio values, product sales trends, or (need I say it) information about our employees. For the sake of argument, let’s say we are ornithologists and have thousands upon thousands of binders in our company that contain data about BIRDS. So we have Big Birds, little birds, migratory birds, and so forth. At some point, we probably have duplicates of data within these binders—two large yellow birds that might represent the same bird, perhaps—so what we want to do is eliminate the excess data, keeping only what is essential in providing a single, consolidated view.
Getting Rid of Duplicate Birds
If your organization has too many binders full of data, there are steps to take in managing your master data. Some of the ideas we promote at Acumen Solutions are the following:
- Know what data you want to report on. There’s no use trying to create a one-stop shopping hub if your data isn’t of significant value to your organization. Also, the increased complexity really stretches out the cost to implement. Keep it simple in the beginning and your updates incremental and you’ll be happier in the long run.
- Establish governance through a data analytics strategy. Keep yourself from falling back into the sandpit that got you where you are in the first place.
- Plan your data integration through the right tools and sources. Understand where the data “lives”, who owns it, and how much data quality control needs to be performed on it.
- Select your technology. All too often, we want a single solution to cover everything. There’s no reason why you can’t have a hybrid of solutions ranging from basic spreadsheet pivot tables to the cutting-edge cloud-based platforms. Pick the reports that are of the most interest, the dynamic types of features you want on them, and move forward from there.
- Maximize your data. Your centralized data may be around for a long time, so you might as well set it up for reuse and repurposing. Start thinking about data marts that you can share among other departments and pretty soon the data will start bringing back value.
Obviously, these steps aren’t easy to achieve. Companies have been placing data in silos for years and trying to implement a cultural change overnight will mean nothing if the business isn’t firmly committed. A high degree of personal and corporate investment is mandatory if organizations are to control the amount of data stored in their binders and continue to separate fact from irrelevant fiction. But with the right approach, attitude, and commitment, these binders full of data eventually will bring value to an otherwise daunting, yet critically important, milestone in an organization’s development.