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....umentId=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.