The term “data agility” was aired recently in a Forbes.com article by H.O. Maycotte. The article is called Ready, Set, Go – How Fast Is Your Data?
The article revolves around getting your data more fit. Notably, it is not about getting data fit for a known purpose of use, which is the thinking that has been around in the data and information quality realm for years. It is about having the data that makes you able to quickly adjust business strategies to meet changing customer needs.
Some of this data will be master data. Master data is arguably the most difficult kind of data to work with in order to achieve data agility. This challenge was examined in the post Business Agility, Continuous Improvement and MDM.
A week ago I had the pleasure of hosting a workshop on the linkage between Business Process Management (BPM) and Master Data Management (MDM) at the Marcus Evans MDM conference in Barcelona, Spain. One of the solutions we referred to many times was to establish a common reporting approach across BPM and MDM grounded on the sentiment that you can’t manage what you can’t measure.
Setting improved agility as a goal for a master data programme is an additional approach. I am working on such a programme right now. Our executive sponsor actually wanted selling more stuff to be the goal. My promise is that the improved master data agility will lead to improved business agility that will lead to being able to sell more stuff in the future.
Liliendahl on Data Quality 