Master data management necessary to help make sense of big data: Novarica

Key to supporting best practices in master data management (MDM) is to develop a single view of MDM that can be referenced by all systems, reporting and business processes, suggests a new brief from research and advisory firm Novarica.

Issued Tuesday, Master Data Management in a Big Data World emphasizes the need to incorporate MDM capabilities into an overall data strategy.

Responsibilities of chief information officers (CIOs) with regard to unstructured and structured data are becoming highly complex.

The brief offers a checklist for CIOs and chief data officers to follow:

• determine the senior level project sponsor and who pays;
• establish organizational structure for data;
• link MDM architecture to business goals and objectives;
• create policies around data and how the data should be managed and controlled;
• determine what system or process creates the official data of record;
• supplement internal data with enriched data and external/internal big data;
• deploy any multi-year MDM programs in an incremental fashion; and
• consider a cloud-first strategy.

“MDM is more than a technology. It is a program of work involving an assessment of business needs, a data sourcing strategy, a data-cleansing strategy to address quality, an architecture and integration initiative, data documentation and classification, as well as an organizational evolution for data governance and ownership,” says Mitch Wein, brief author and Novarica’s vice president of research and consulting.

“The goal is to create a single view of the master data, which can then be referenced by all systems, reporting and business processes,” Wein says in a statement from Novarica, whose clients include 90-plus property/casualty and life/annuity insurers.

“The insurance industry’s evolution into a fully digitized provider of risk services that focus on the customer, not the product, is highly dependent upon data that is collected, stored, managed, and ultimately used,” the statement emphasizes.