Data Quality
When carrying out a master data management project, data quality is an inherent and important part of your project. If building a master data repository to hold “golden copy” data of customer, product, asset or whatever, then it is important to assess the quality of the data that already exists within your systems prior to populating the master data hub(s). There are a number of vendors providing specialist solutions in this area, and these are partners with the MDM platform vendors.
There are technologies that can help you establish data relationships within your existing systems, sort out duplicates, and use a variety of algorithms to help suggest candidate data to merge e.g. “Andy Hayler”, “A Hayler” and “A.D Hayler” may all be stored as separate records in different systems but be the same person. Matching and merging is a complex process, and you will need to develop business validation rules that are specific to your requirements. You will also want to monitor the level of data quality within your key systems and be alerted to any significant changes from the norm.
There are a large number of data quality vendors out there, a few quite large and well established. However there are also some interesting specialist vendors whose technology may be very well suited to your particular requirements.
At the Information Difference we have detailed vendor profiles on the most important ones, and can help you with understanding the best products for your needs.