Yellowfin Business Intelligence have released a whitepaper on measuring data quality for successfull master data management.

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http://www.yellowfinbi.com/Document.i4?DocumentId=106061

Abstract.
 
Business Intelligence systems are designed to help organizations understand their operations, customers, financial situation, product performance, trends and a host of key performance indicators. This information is used to make both tactical as well as strategic decisions. Poor intelligence results in poor decision making. The costs can be enormous. Over the last few years, a serious effort has been made to understand the main cause of poor quality business analytics. The majority of organizations and analysts now agree that one of the main reasons that BI projects fail to deliver is because the operational data feeding the analytical engines is filled with errors, duplications and inconsistencies. If the poor quality reporting is to be fixed, it has to be fixed at its source. This is achieved by addressing poor quality data in the applications that run the business via Master Data Management (MDM). MDM is the glue that ties analytical systems to what is actually happening on the operational side of the business and Yellowfin BI is the perfect tool to analyze and report on that data. This paper will discuss how Yellowfin assists in the MDM process; the importance of data quality, and how reporting on relevant metrics is vital for a successful project.

Extract.

Master Data Management is all about fixing poor data quality at its source and managing its constant and inevitable change when shared across more than one transactional application. This data represents the business rules around which the transactions are executed. This data also represents the key dimensions around which analysis is done.

Maximum business value comes from managing both transactional and analytical master data. These solutions are called Enterprise MDM. Operational data cleansing improves the operational efficiencies of the applications themselves and the business processes that use these applications.

The resultant dimensions for analytical analysis are true representations of how the business is actually running. Yellowfin provides the most comprehensive, integrated BI solution to support an enterprise MDM solution on the market today. The following sections will illustrate how this combination of operations and analytics solves key business problems.

Getting started with MDM is often difficult – does an organisation take a proactive or a reactive approach to MDM? Some organisations start applying MDM in isolated areas before moving on to other isolated areas, and maybe pull these together into an enterprise approach later on. Isolated starting points are more often problems than opportunities, with organisations reacting to problems that require immediate attention rather than taking a strategic approach. Ultimately, the organisation needs to get beyond the hectic fire drills of reactive MDM and also apply proactive MDM, which explores data and metadata to identify opportunities for master data improvement.

Surviving MDM in the long run requires a mix of reactive and proactive practices and this is where Yellowfin can really assist in the reporting on the process.