A keynote at the Master Data Management Summit Europe 2017 was presented by Mar Cabra, Editor, Data & Research Unit, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). In her presentation Mar told how journalists explored huge amounts of data in order to reveal how rich and famous people used tax havens to avoid paying tax in their home countries.
Some of the technologies used in doing that are the same emerging technologies we right now are considering, and some are already using, within Master Data Management as for example graph databases.
What stroke me the most was however the sharing approach that probably made all the difference in the impact achieved from revealing the core data in the Panama Papers. The journalists from Süddeutsche Zeitung who originality was offered the data did not keep the data to themselves but shared the data with the community of journalists in the news media ecosystem from around the world.
We can also make better use of master data, and gain better business impact, if we share feasible master data in wider business ecosystems as explained here on the piece on Master Data Share.
I’m not saying all enterprises should share everything with their business ecosystems. For party master data there are indeed many limitations as very much trending these days with the upcoming GDPR regulations. With product master data you should also consider what is best managed as your own story and what is best for your business in a sharing approach. These considerations are elaborated in the post Using Internal and External Product Information to Win.
Liliendahl on Data Quality 