Customer master data management (CMDM) and customer data governance are co-dependent disciplines. Successful CMDM is not possible with at least a few key data governance elements.
While the CMDM may be understood as principally the technology, the actual data governance is the people, processes and technology.
With Pretectum’s CMDM we feel that the three are inextricably linked and so do not see it as being possible to pick up a solution like CMDM without data governance.
The reverse may be true. You may have data governance without master data management but then the effectiveness of your data governance policies and procedures have to be called into question.
We, at Pretectum, also feel that data management and data governance cannot realistically be the responsibility of IT. We feel that data management and data governance has to be a collection of technologies, policies, procedures and participants that are squarely found in the realm of the business with IT functioning in a janitorial role, implementing the technology bits and having the business or subject matter experts implementing the policies and procedures and driving adoption.
You can envisage this being something where there are possibly subject-matter experts in IT and the business who apply their skills and knowledge to the data based on the data management and data governance definitions of the business, the Critical Data Assets (CDA) and data handling scenarios for the business.
Unless selling data is actually your business, housing data governance and data management within technology groups make data management an operational overhead rather than a data asset. This, in turn, makes the customer master data management system a silo which may hold near and dear all the good solid data management principles that make sense and are aligned with best in class, but which don’t adequately have the “buy-in” of business leaders and their down-lines.
It is likely you already have a great deal of customer data already but you would do well to clearly define what kind of customer data you already have and identify where it is located.
A data catalogue might help with this and tracking where that data is, what it is and why you need it is a good first step.
Your approach to this could be as simple as creating an inventory and identifying who is responsible for each repository. Again, the assignment of responsibility shouldn’t be IT it should be someone in the business who has skin in the game if that data is bad or the system is down. or not working as expected. This approaches moves toward ensuring that you only collect the data that you actually need, driving toward easier and more manageable use.
To work this out, start by identifying business goals and objectives. What do you expect to achieve by tracking and having that customer data in the first place? Once you know this, identify the commonalities between data sources that can drive you towards customer master data harmonization.
We already suggested that you have an inventory of systems; these will likely be varied, coming from internal and external sources, structured, semi-structured and unstructured. It is critical that in building the best possible view of the customer, you consider your CRM, CDP, eCommerce and ERP systems as well as POS, Service and Support systems as potential sources of data. Pretectum can help with bringing all the sources to a unified front end.
Though there are cautions against having too much customer data, oftentimes, if you have a legitimate purpose and reason for having the data and obtained it through appropriate channels with consent, then collecting too much data is the way to initially start, you can pare this back at some later stage. Obtaining customer data consent and self-service curation is also something Pretectum can help with.
The next part of the journey is performing data cleansing, enrichment, and deduplication rituals. Pretectum can help initially with data quality issue identification but you have to make the hard decision as to whether you want to change records in situ at the source or you want to do this post hoc. Setting up correction regimes is something could do pretty much anywhere depending on the nature of the problems. This is also dependent on your implementation approach for customer master data management.
A sound definition of what constitutes good customer master data is checked and verified by the Pretectum CMDM as an integral part of the data handling. This approach to customer master data management gives you a sense of the level of data quality continuously. While it can be used to intercept data quality issues at the time of data creation it can also be usd periodically to provide you with a data quality scorecard to help you understand your organization’s journey toward error and inconsistency-free data. The highest possible quality of data is essential for making good decisions about customer relationships.
Data governance is a cornerstone for appropriate and optimized customer master data and it should provide a long-term framework for the best decision-making. For it to be most effective though, there needs to be a degree of organizational master data management maturity that sees clear roles, responsibilities, and accountabilities.
The precise nature of your governance structure will depend on the size and complexity of your organization, but it should include a steering committee, data stewards, and data owners. Your data governance steering committee is responsible for setting the organizational strategy and goals for customer master data management. Data stewards own the management and maintenance of the data, while the data owners are accountable for ensuring the data is accurate and current.
With your customer data converging and flowing into the Pretectum SaaS platform as a central repository, your organization is afforded a single source of truth for customer data, thereby making it easier to keep track of customer master data changes, providing customer master data quality assurances and the highest possible security all while making necessary customer master data information available to those who need it.
Pretectum’s CMDM for your customer master data allows your business to benefit from some of the best in class data management best practices which go a long way toward ensuring your customer data is accurate, reliable, up to date and fit for purpose leading to improved customer service personalization, sales and marketing effectiveness, and meaningful opportunities for organizational growth.