Every year, companies waste millions of dollars because of the poor quality and usage of their data.  I can’t begin to tell you how many new credit card applications I’m offered from companies that should know that I already have the very card they’re offering me.  In most cases, the data exists to eliminate the waste, but it’s highly likely that the data exists in multiple systems and are described differently in each one.  To solve this problem, companies are now turning to Master Data Management (MDM) tools to improve data quality and usage.  Among other things, MDM tools allow companies to do the following:

·         Identify and map the numerous disparate data sources that exist throughout the enterprise.

·         Consolidate data sources when it makes sense.

·         Normalize data sources to ensure that metadata elements share common names, definitions and even values across systems.

While these tools have provided tremendous gains in data quality and usage for ERP and CRM systems, they rarely find their way to the ECM systems that have typically been implemented at the  departmental level.  It should be noted that the departmental nature of ECM systems has also led to companies often having multiple disparate systems, each with its own information structure.  In cases such as these, MDM tools can greatly reduce the cost and time needed to consolidate these systems or, at a minimum, normalize the information architectures to allow for greater interoperability.  The same can be said for consolidating systems following a merger or acquisition.

Thinking about the deployment of ECM systems, consider that, although, one of the first things companies do before implementing an ECM system is take an inventory, that inventory usually consists of identifying only the content to be captured and not the metadata that exists elsewhere that could and should be used.  Understanding the definition of metadata elements is critical to the quality and ease of integration.  If “Customer Name” is defined differently in each system, the ability to utilize the data across platforms is much more difficult and time consuming if it is possible at all.  In many cases, metadata dropdown values are already defined in ERP, CRM and other core systems.  Creating new, different dropdown options only decreases the overall quality and increases the long term costs of using and maintaining the system. 

Clients who already utilize a master data model and who include it in their ECM architecture will quickly realize a number of core benefits including:

·         Faster deployment of ECM initiatives

·         Improved findability of content due to data quality and standardization

·         Greatly facilitated application integration due to common data definitions

·         Reduced training costs and an improved user experience

·         Facilitated consolidating or normalizing systems

·         Enables ECM metadata to be easily included in Business Intelligence (BI) initiatives

However, even without the MDM tools in place, a metadata inventory is still a highly recommended practice prior to building any ECM information architecture.  Alignment with core systems is critical to the success of any enterprise capable deployment.