In this era of digital disruption and transformation, the amount of data flowing through the information systems of not only large enterprises, but of small and mid-sized companies as well, is exploding at unprecedented rates. That reality represents both a great opportunity, and a potentially huge problem for data-dependent businesses—and today, that's just about every business.
The opportunity lies in the fact that this wealth of information provides companies with the potential to extract from it valuable insights about their industry, customers, suppliers, and their own internal operations, that can give them a significant competitive advantage in their marketplace. But that won't happen without specific, focused attention to data management discipline. As one Deloitte report notes,
"Organizations that harness data to gain insights of their customers will position themselves for better success in the long-haul. However, realizing these insights to become a data-driven organization requires a disciplined approach."
A report published a decade ago by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) amplifies that point:
"A rigorous and disciplined approach to data management ensures that data can be used to ask complex questions … and allows many questions to be answered computationally, without the need for significant manual effort."
When a business fails to take a disciplined approach to data management, the result is often confusion, uncertainty, and lack of trust across the company's organizational landscape.
Disciplined data management is critical because even in smaller businesses, critical company information often resides on a variety of independent platforms, each of which functions as an isolated silo with its own distinct purposes and standards for data inclusion, organization, and formatting. Unless the data from those disparate sources is skillfully consolidated, rationalized, and controlled, the likely result is numerous instances of operational confusion and errors due to issues such as duplicated records on different systems that supposedly refer to the same entity, but which are inconsistent with one another.
In other words,
A lack of adequate data management discipline is a sure recipe for data chaos.
How can a company impose the discipline required to extract maximum value from its information resources? How can it bring order out of chaos, and transform a swamp of sometimes contradictory data records into a pool of trusted, reliable business information? The answer is Master Data Management.
The basic purpose of MDM is to impose needed discipline on a company's product, asset, customer, supplier, employee, site, and corporate data resources. It does this by consolidating all the organization's critical business information into a single virtual repository (not necessarily all in one physical location) that links each data entity to a single point of reference.
This means, for example, that although information about a customer may have been entered in many different locations (at a retail outlet, online, etc.), by different business entities, at different times, for different purposes, and with different formats, what is returned when that customer's information is accessed is a single, up-to-date, authoritative master record that is a trustworthy source (a "single source of truth") for all information about that individual.
To accomplish that goal, an MDM system must perform several distinct functions. In its January 2021 "Magic Quadrant for Enterprise MDM" report, Gartner outlines the processes needed for an MDM implementation to successfully provide disciplined data governance. These include:
In other words, a good MDM system will locate and identify relevant data held in a variety of locations and systems throughout the organization, standardize the data's formatting, cleanse it to eliminate errors and inconsistencies, and ultimately build a single, consolidated set of master records for each entity referenced by the company's information systems.
That process necessarily depends on software that implements appropriate workflows, monitoring systems, and controls on an ongoing basis. And that's where low-code enters the picture. Due to its demonstrated ability to create software apps in the most rapid and cost-effective manner, low-code development has become an integral part of the MDM equation.
According to Gartner, "MDM has long been perceived as complex and expensive; the luxury of large organizations with deep pockets."
But with the advent of low-code software development, that's no longer the case. As Gautham Viswanathan, co-founder and Chief Product Officer at eSystems partner Workato notes:
"Digital transformation requires boundless access to timely, trusted data. Innovation amplifies when this data is delivered through automated processes without heavy dependencies on technical skill sets."
Low-code development provides exactly the capabilities required to bring that vision to fruition.
With a low-code platform, workers can design software applications to automate data management workflows simply by dragging and dropping pre-built components onto a user-friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI). This approach allows both software professionals, and non-technical employees with few programming skills, to quickly create apps using minimal amounts of hand coding.
As much as 90% of a low-code app's logic is contained in pre-written modules, with only about 10% needing to be hand coded. As a result, the software needed to implement the data access, workflow, monitoring, and control processes required for an effective MDM system can be produced much more rapidly and inexpensively than with traditional software development techniques.
Master data healthiness is the key to successful business process automation. And low-code is the key to implementing a comprehensive, flexible, and agile Master Data Management system.
Are you missing the discipline required for effective data management? MDM automation with low-code will create it for you. eSystems can provide you with low-code tools to help you quickly and easily implement the MDM automations you need while also reducing slow and error-prone manual work to a minimum.
Perhaps you're concerned about the cost of your current MDM system. eSystems can enable you to achieve faster and simpler master data management through the powers of low-code, and do so with substantial cost savings.
If you'd like to know more about how low-code can revolutionize the way your business manages data, and how eSystems can help you get started with that transformation, please contact us today!
WRITTEN BY: Reggie Rusan | Chief Technology Officer