Despite the efforts made by enterprises to be more data-driven, some of the most fundamental questions about an enterprise—such as how many customers it has—remain difficult to answer. Creating a “single version of the truth” that represents customers, products, suppliers or employees requires not just the ability to integrate and manage data from multiple business entities, regions, departments and applications, but also agreement on the definitions of those terms and the related data. This is a perennial challenge for many enterprises. One-half of participants in Ventana Research’s Data Governance Benchmark Research say disagreement on the definitions of data are a primary concern in managing data effectively.
Data teams are tasked with accelerating the delivery of trusted data assets to support various business programs. Data unification facilitates a 360-degree view of customers, products, suppliers or employees by providing common definitions across multiple data sources and comprehensive attributes including transactions, interactions, relationships, and calculated or predicted scores. Master data management (MDM) is a well-established approach to improving confidence in data through the creation and enforcement of common data definitions. Encompassing data validation, data deduplication and data enrichment, MDM provides the foundational single source of truth for data unification and is a natural starting point for creating reusable data assets.
