Acquired data comes with a myriad of potential issues. Whenever possible you want to originate your own data or at least have some understanding of the heritage of that data. This is particularly true when it comes to customer data.

Collecting customer data as the primary is largely considered an expensive exercise and one that not everyone can afford to engage in.

Owning your own data is by far and wide an advantage. Owning the sourcing and curation of customer master data, in particular, is something that with the Pretectum C-MDM is now possible and in fact improved, even for organizations that have strong data traditions or no data collection heritage at all.

Irrespective of whether you have just a few thousand records or hundreds of millions, the approach is fundamentally the same.

Define the data, define the business rules, define the distribution and then incrementally build the data. cycle data through as many streams of finishing until you are happy with it and only then commit it to your master data repository.

Splice, merge, slice, and dice it into as many shapes and super and subsets as makes sense for the needs of the business.

When examining the data you have, or data that has been made available to you, you need to consider at least three key elements.

Meaning

What is the fundamental meaning or significance of this data to the organization? Is the data meant to serve as a single source of truth a golden record, an immutable reference that you will always point to as an external keyed identifier for the customer and definition?

Purpose

What do you have in mind for what you want to do with this data? Is the purpose of this data integration, selling, reselling, targeting, redistribution, marketing, finance and accounting, logistics, health? What are the consequences of potentially duplicate or missing data in the customer records, who will it affect, and what costs might be incurred or benefits forfeited?

Fitness

The topic of data quality is a focus for all types of data held by the enterprise but the data that is stored in the customer master is of particular importance because the customer is a point of convergence for so many areas of organizational data processing.

In healthcare, having multiple copies of the same patient can make for ill-informed healthcare decisions as administrators and healthcare professionals struggle to take advantage of a unified patient profile and history. In the banking, insurance, and financial services sector it obscures the credit exposure and vested interest of the individual making it tough to assess the risk and value of a client. In the public sector, having a person defined more than once risks oversubscription to public and social benefits, under-reporting of repeat offenders, and over distributions of concessions or access.

In retail and anything that involves marketing, not only does it provide only partial views of customers, it also leads to confusion, transactional friction, and unnecessary additional costs, particularly in relation to communications.

With Pretectum C-MDM you have complete control over not just the meaning, but also the purpose and fitness of your customer master data whether you created it, migrated it, or simply acquired it.

If you’re building data for CRM, ERP, CDP, or an EHR, Pretectum will be an indispensable help for you in support of any and all of these objectives. Why not consider a free trial?