Publishers both hold and generate a large amount of data about their authors, customers, members, and content. How can small to medium– sized publishers better take advantage of the data produced to improve their operations and publishing programs? Master Data Management (MDM) can often help organizations normalize data from different parts of their business and help make it actionable.
How Master Data Management (MDM) Benefits Publishers
While MDM is important for organizations of all sizes, in a small publishing business there can be unique challenges with critical data being siloed. Often there can be multiple accounts for the same customers, authors, and other parties across the different business systems that different divisions of a publisher may be using. Within membership organizations, membership records may live in multiple places and be unconnected to publishing functions. For example, an organization that uses different software for Customer Service, Sales, Editorial, or Membership activities, may list an institution under multiple names in the different systems, which could create data unification problems. When data is messy and unconnected, it is difficult to gain insight into the various relationships among organizations and individuals with whom the publisher interacts, and to provide information to staff who would gain knowledge from the ability to access, compare, and analyze multiple pieces of data.
For organizations looking to improve the quality of their data, it is advisable for them to work through an MDM project. Undertaking MDM will help establish the concept of a ‘single source of truth’ in data, so that all data about organizations, authors and members is unified. Where data is not centralized, it is inevitable that different sources of data will independently change and diverge from one another over time. Organizations that adopt MDM can address the process for transforming data into a central source, where data is then uniquely identified, consistently classified, and quality checked. Once established, the central source can then supply the data back to systems (and people), which were previously siloed. As a result, data remains in sync and can be connected to one another via persistent identifiers (PIDs), meaning no more duplicate accounts, appending missing data, or manually correcting inaccurate data. By using PIDs, an organization can tie together information across business systems and job functions, making data more actionable and allowing publishers to make decisions based on that data.
Understanding the Challenges and Rewards of an MDM Project
Undertaking an MDM project is not without its challenges. For small and medium-sized publishers (like university presses and societies) there can be resource challenges. There may not be a dedicated data team, which requires redirecting personnel with data manipulation and analysis skills away from other responsibilities. For some publishers, there also may not be the systems and tools in place to work with data efficiently and accurately. In circumstances like these, the concept of MDM may seem overwhelming.
However, through the adoption of MDM best practices and a robust and granular PID schema that already has unified and consistent data, organizations of all sizes can improve their data quality and get on the path to a better understanding of their data. Even before implementing a PID and MDM solution, asking teams that use and produce data to document that data and then asking questions like:
- What data is held?
- Where is the data held?
- Who has access to what data?
- How is this data created?
- How is this data updated?
- Who would benefit from access to the data?
After gathering this data and asking these questions, look for data quality issues like duplicates, inconsistencies across data (lack of consistent entries, taxonomies, etc.), and out of date or missing data. This will help define priority areas, reduce manual work, produce efficiencies, and establish goals for the implementation and evaluation of MDM within the organization. Adopting a PID solution (like Ringgold Identify Database) with rich hierarchical data that is consistently updated can help in both the implementation and continued maintenance of an organization’s MDM program.
See more Master Data Management Essentials for Small and Medium Sized Publishers and learn more about how Ringgold Solutions can help publishers looking to improve their data quality.