Achieving customer data integration through master data management in enterprise information management

M.Com. (Business Management)Data and the use thereof, is considered to be a source of competitive advantage for organisations. In order to achieve this it needs to be managed appropriately, and existing literature considers enterprise information management (EIM) to be the foundation for organisations to manage information successfully. (For the purposes of this dissertation, data and information will be treated as analogous concepts.) Key contributing factors to the success of EIM have been identified as ensuring data governance is in place, and that there is a focus on data quality. Within EIM, a key set of data that must be managed effectively is customer data. In many organisations – including the financial services organisation that is the focus of this study – customer data is held in disparate systems across the organisation. Creating a single view of how customers interact with an organisation is deemed of crucial importance for future organisational growth, and the initiatives that organisations undertake to create this view is referred to in the literature as customer data integration (CDI). In order for CDI to be successful, master data management (MDM) needs to be addressed; this will ensure that core data is managed consistently across the disparate systems. This study sought to determine how the concepts of EIM, CDI and MDM were being applied in the organisation under review, and how closely this application matched the recommendations of the literature. In addition, the study sought to uncover additional factors that had an impact on customer data integration, and information management in general, in the organisation. What was found is that in the organisation in question, how information management is being addressed is consistent with the literature in some areas – primarily the importance of a single view of customer and the supporting roles of information governance and data quality – but divergent in others, the key area being that there is no EIM strategy in the organisation that drives a consolidated approach to information management. Organisational culture was also highlighted by the literature as being a critical influencer on how information is managed, and this was supported by the findings. Additional factors that were found to have a significant influence on data management – which were not highlighted by the literature – included the importance of processes, and especially for CDI the critical role played by legislation, in particular the Financial Intelligence Centre Act (FICA). An additional crucial factor, again not highlighted by the literature, is the difficulty organisations have in placing an actual financial value on the use of information. Although intrinsically it is understood that information is valuable, the difficulty in ascribing an explicit value to it is a key inhibitor (in conjunction with organisational culture), to the organisation initiating data management projects at a strategic level, and instead having to address data management as a component of projects driven by individual business units