Every data point that your company has at its disposal can either be an asset or a liability. When used in a well-planned master data management (MDM) strategy, the records you collect and associate with patients, clients, or customers become actionable metrics that can spur growth. However, if your data is mismanaged at any step of the process, you run the risk of making costly decisions based on bad data. The success of your MDM strategy depends on how efficiently you arrange three essential master data management components: the entity resolution engine, the entity identity information management system, and the master data system of record. The following information will help you better understand these components and consider solutions that make the connections between them more seamless.
Entity Resolution
The entity resolution (ER) component determines whether two records are referencing the same real-world entity. When two records are identified as being the same entity, they are labeled as equivalent. The primary concerns of the ER component are to link as many of the equivalent pairs as possible, a factor known as recall, and only link pairs that are actually equivalent, which is known as precision. A high-recall, high-precision ER process is invaluable to your company because it both deduplicates records and shows relationships between data from different sources. Depending on your specific use case, entity resolution can allow you to eliminate duplicate data that is costing your company money in inaccurate marketing efforts and also see the full view of the entities. More importantly, an ER engine helps you make confident business decisions backed by high-quality data.
Entity Identity Information Management
The entity identity information management (EIIM) component allows you to organize your records into a single master entity and manage the life cycle of the data used to create that entity. The EIIM portion of your master data management strategy is focused on storing data after the ER process and recognizing when future records correspond to master entities that are already in the system. Over time, you can gain a clearer picture of customer or patient interactions if the EIIM component is working optimally and facilitating data-driven marketing and customer service.
Master Data System of Record
The master data system of record is the top layer of your MDM strategy, allowing your company to organize and use a vast collection of master entities produced by the EIIM system. The master data system of record turns a vast body of data into a system or multiple systems that meet your specific business needs. By building records that support your use case, you can mold data into its most valuable forms. For example, the chief executive officer of a major health care company may want to track extensive histories of patient admissions. Meanwhile, a business analyst who works at the same company may need to view master entities in a way that surfaces patients’ most recent addresses for a marketing campaign. An experienced chief data officer can structure a master data system of record that supports both business requirements.
Maximizing Component Efficiency
In the past, many companies closely linked the individual components of their MDM systems in an effort to create all-in-one data management solutions. The resulting systems were inflexible because any change in one component affected the efficiency of others. There is an emerging trend in the big data industry to decouple master data management components so they can operate as cohesive but distinct members of a system. This layered architecture has been applied to products like HiPER, a data management software system created by Black Oak Analytics. By decoupling ER, EIIM, and the MDM system of record, HiPER offers unrivaled levels of scalability and efficiency that are needed by today’s data-driven companies.
If you are interested in optimizing the components of your master data management system, contact Black Oak Analytics today!