How to Get Your Enterprise Data Ready for Takeoff This Summer

It’s summer: The sun is bright, the days are long, and the vacation you’ve been dreaming of is finally within reach. But before you pack your bags and get on your way, you need a plan. You need to decide where to go, pack everything you’ll need when you arrive, and review the itinerary with those traveling with you. Only then can you load up the car or board the plane and be on your way to your destination. 

Planning the perfect summer getaway takes foresight and preparation. And the same is true for managing your data. But too often, companies jump straight to operationalizing their data before taking the time to prepare it. As a result, they hit roadblocks, experience delays, and encounter pressure they could have avoided. 

However, when companies take the time to assess their data, improve it, and review it with users before they operationalize it, their trip goes much smoother. That full process is the master data management (MDM) journey. And like any great summer vacation, it’s worth doing right.  

Plan Your Trip: Understand Where You Want to Go

Messy, inaccurate data is a persistent problem for businesses worldwide. However, by assessing your data, you can understand which data is fit-for-purpose—and which data needs improvement before you continue on your journey. 

Hallmarks of dirty data include data that is:

• Incorrect: The data values are simply wrong.
• Incomplete: The data is missing some of its values.
• Inconsistent: The same data values are represented in multiple ways across data sets.
• Duplicative: Data appears multiple times in the same or multiple systems.
• Non-compliant: The data doesn’t comply with the organization’s security and/or governance policies.
• Siloed: The data lives in a departmental or divisional system and is inaccessible by others for analytical and operational use cases. 

Attempting to use this poor-quality data to improve customer experiences, drive revenue, or make strategic decisions is a mistake. Instead, you need to move to the next step of the journey: improving your data. 

Pack Your Bags: Clean and Enrich Your Data

Packing for a trip isn’t just about throwing things in a bag; it’s about making sure you have what you need, ditching what you don’t, and filling in the gaps. The same goes for preparing your data.

Cleaning your data is a critical, yet often overlooked, step in the MDM journey. Why? Because it’s tedious—and challenging. And while it may feel like this step is slowing you down, it’s actually accelerating your ability to deliver business value. 

The best way to improve your data quickly is by using an AI-native MDM solution. Doing so allows you to:

• Align your data to a schema to provide a common frame of reference for your source data that aligns to a universal understanding of the entity. 
• Eliminate duplicate records across silos using pre-built machine learning models for better entity resolution—so you're not carrying extra baggage you don’t need. 
• Fix bad and/or missing values to create consistency in your data and automatically clean and normalize it so that it’s easier for both machines and people to use.
• Enrich data with reputable, third-party sources by filling in the gaps in your internal data, as well as including additional data attributes from external sources.
• Create golden records that serve as a single source of truth for each entity by consolidating and standardizing data about customers, products, suppliers, or providers. 

Review Your Itinerary: Gather Feedback and Build Trust

Before any trip, it’s smart to review the itinerary with your fellow travelers. That way, you can make sure everyone’s aligned, expectations are clear, and nothing important gets overlooked. The same principle applies to your data.

Collaborating with stakeholders and asking for feedback are equally important steps when it comes to data quality management. Failing to do so puts you at risk of delivering data that is misaligned with real-world needs, which, in turn, results in missed opportunities and underutilized insights. By proactively asking data consumers for feedback on the data, you create a partnership that builds trust, ensuring that the data is accessible, actionable, and hits the mark when it comes to solving business problems.

Get Ready for Takeoff: Operationalize Your Data

You’ve made a plan, packed your bags, and reviewed your itinerary. It’s finally time to head to your destination!

Operationalizing data is a key step in enterprise data management. It involves structuring and integrating your data so that it’s usable in workflows and consumable by the business. While it may feel tedious at the time, investing the time and effort to assess, improve, and review your data pays off in the end because you know your data is accurate, trustworthy, and ready to use to deliver exceptional customer experiences, uncover new revenue opportunities, and drive more efficient and effective operations. 

Wheels up—your data’s ready to fly!

Remember Your GPS: The Role of AI-Native MDM

Even the best travel plans can go off course without a reliable GPS. The same is true for your data journey. AI-native MDM acts as your navigation system, combining AI’s efficiency and scalability with business context and human expertise to help you stay on track and reach your destination faster.

Unlike traditional, rules-based MDM solutions, AI-native MDM adapts to meet the needs of modern, data-driven businesses as they progress through the MDM journey by delivering AI-powered capabilities such as:

• Entity resolution: Detect, match, and reconcile records that are the same entity, such as a person or business, across your enterprise data landscape.
• AI-native data mastering: Automate data mastering at scale by combining pre-trained machine learning models, semantic comparison with large language models (LLMs), and human feedback.
• Data enrichment: Boost accuracy and add meaningful context by tapping into trustworthy, third-party sources,
• Data quality: Validate and standardize data across systems and sources without rules or manual data curation.
• Real-time APIs: Gain instant access to an accurate, consistent, connected, and continuously updated view of every entity that matters to the business.

Vacation Mode on

Don’t let another summer pass you by. Take our short quiz to discover where you are on the MDM journey.