Five mistakes teams make with master data management
The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit master data management.
Data outlives the applications built on top of it, which is why the model deserves more thought than the screens. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.
The mistakes we see most
- Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
- Assuming someone else already owns it
- Two systems with different customer records will disagree at the worst moment
- Decide which system is authoritative for each entity
- Never checking whether the fix actually worked
Reconciliation is cheaper than arbitration later. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.
Turning this into a decision
The short version
Most data problems are ownership problems that turned into technical ones. Three things worth confirming about master data management before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Two systems with different customer records will disagree at the worst moment — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.