eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

Master Data Management (MDM) is receiving increasing attention from both academia and the business world. This is due to the realization of the potential good-quality master data has in improving business performance by e.g. supporting the optimization of business operations. The cost of having inferior-quality master data is also one that companies operating in today’s fast-changing and competitive business environment cannot afford: an impeded understanding of the business realities which will ultimately affect negatively the company’s bottom line. MDM has emerged as a solution for avoiding these costs, as it promises increased master data quality.

This thesis aims at contributing to the subject of MDM by exploring whether data governance models can bring improvement to the management of master data, more specifically so to the one of customer master data. This objective was pursued using a case company who found itself having inferior quality customer master data and who, according to preliminary interviews, lacked of governance related to it. This company, eager to tap on the benefits good-quality customer master data might generate, initiated the execution of this study. The case company is a global organization headquartered in Finland, operating in the technology industry.

The effects establishing a data governance organization might have on customer master data management were analyzed through two specific already existing models. Since neither of them was found to be optimal for the case company, a new model was developed in this thesis. The newly developed organizational model allowed generating more accurate results related to the effects data governance might have on customer master data, as it fit the case company better.

This research concludes that a lack of data governance does impede the management and thus the quality of customer master data. As stated in literature, data governance is indeed a critical element in MDM. It then follows that establishing data governance can be expected to bring significant improvement to the management of the case company’s customer master data, and consequently, to its quality.