Master Data Governance: 6 Best Practices

There is nothing more precious than data. Businesses guard it like their survival depends on it. In fact, their survival, goodwill and reputation depend on how well they treat and guard their data. So enterprises should give utmost importance to Master Data Governance, especially in the light of stringent compliant laws like the GDPR (European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation).

Master data governance, as everyone knows, is the deployment of data governance in your enterprise. The objective is to improve the handling of your master data which is the backbone of your business operations.

Why Master Data Governance

The process is absolutely required to:

Ensure policies and rules are followed: When dealing with data, it is important to follow internal policies and external compliance regulations. The policies typically revolve around:

o Data quality
o Privacy and protection
o Retention and deletion
o Risk management

Data governance also helps you set up rules that ensure your Master Data Management system is implemented in line with compliance laws.

Follow cataloging: The cataloging capabilities within master data governance is the best way to locate sensitive data, guarantee data accuracy and standardization.

Perform process mapping: Process mapping helps understand the flow of data between resources as part of your business activities. Understanding how data is being shared and used within the organization help enterprises assess compliance risk exposure and set up rules to warrant better compliance.

Get visibility to people: The process can document and offer insights into people who propel your data governance process.

Document workflow: Documenting workflow after identifying the key people will improve collaboration between people that are essential to the process.

Define metrics: The data governance can also define the technical metrics such as the number of duplicate records, accuracy and completeness, encryption and masking of personal data among others.

Master Data Governance – Best Practices

Here are 6 best Master Data Governance practices you must follow

1. A Comprehensive Package

If you want to master the art of data governance, you should start with a comprehensive Master Data Management (MDM) package. The platform you choose must be futuristic and scalable. The solution has to be equipped with data classification, cataloging, and quality management.

As you know, data is at risk if it’s not classified properly in terms of sensitivity, especially as more and more organizations are going hybrid. Proper classification is also the best way to ensure that information is easily accessible to users.

2. Slow And Steady

Slow and steady wins the race. This adage holds true even in the context of data governance and management. When you implement, master data management and governance, it is better to start with less complex and use case based data and then move on to the complex ones. The point to keep in mind here is that your solution must be scalable and flexible to adapt based on your requirements.

3. Data Security

Master data governance is all about getting a trusted and single view of your data that helps you beat the odds and improve your business operations. This means data security can never be comprised as the data will mostly include name, phone numbers, email ids, address and even contact preferences of your users. To ensure 100% data security you need to audit the data often.

Enterprises must frequently check the access stamps and log time to make sure that there is no breach of security. Both user authentication and authorization are mandatory to safeguard sensitive data. Enterprises must analyze and monitor the risks of sensitive data periodically and rigorously.

4. Audit And Monitor Sensitive Data

Having a Master Data Management system in place is important and it is equally important to audit the system frequently. It is the best way to ensure that the system is working as designed. Timely auditing also helps your security team to track, identify threats and gather data as well as take necessary actions eliminating any damage or loss. The auditing helps to:

• Understand data sensitivity, function and location of such data using advanced analytics and discovery protocol.
• Determine risk using relevant regulations and understand how and by whom the data is used within the organization.
• Eliminate risk by deploying security controls and limiting access
Compliance, embedded controls, monitoring, analysis, auditing and reporting are the backbone of your cloud based master data management and governance process.

5. Go Hybrid

All your business data is vital to the operation. However, all of them are not sensitive and may not need the same level of protection. That is precisely why enterprises must go Hybrid and take advantage of both public and private cloud infrastructure. This is a great way to save cost while ensuring the flexible movement of workload and data between public and private clouds as the demand and budget changes. Flexibility, scalability and cost saving are the additional benefits of going Hybrid.

6. Incorporation Of Modern Infrastructure

Modern enterprises are looking for flexibility and agility. It requires scalable master data management and governance solutions with modern architecture to fulfill their ever-changing requirements. The solutions need to be flexible enough to move between infrastructure providers. The modern architecture residing within the solution must support microservices without you having to run an upgrade.

Incorporating Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) is another important need of the hour. As the data volume increases, only AI and ML can seamlessly analyze and offer enterprises meaningful and actionable insights. In short, AI and ML are the prerequisites of any modern cloud-based master data management solutions as automation of data stewardship processes is the key to gain relevant insights.

Conclusion

Adopting the right master data governance practices is the best way to deliver a smooth customer experience based on quality and accurate data. Compliance with local and international regulations and customer satisfaction is the only way to establish your authority in your business domain. Leverage on the right data, deliver the right solutions and follow the best practices.