Most companies are battling with master data challenges whether they realise it or not.

When you're consolidating financials from multiple billing systems, you're doing MDM. When you're migrating legacy systems to a new target environment, you're doing MDM. When you're trying to perform root-cause analysis across multiple systems for a customer complaint, you're doing MDM.

We may be linking master data visually or removing duplicates in a one-off operation – but fundamentally, it's still managing master data in some fashion.

Of course, the impact of poorly managed master data is keenly felt by customers and service providers alike.

For service providers, poor quality master data leads to greater costs, poor decision making and reduced performance. For the consumer, it can range from mild annoyance at being sent multiple mailings to the same property, to outright fury at being double-billed.

The reason we find it so hard to manage master data is that, like all data, we are always trying to interpret an abstraction, a mirage of the real data. What we desperately need to do is swap these "surrogate" sources of master data for reality. The question is, how do we do that?

The answer – Assign ownership of master data to the physical entity itself

We've seen this historically in physical items – for example, through the use of RFID technology. As antenna designs and nano-grade materials became more advanced (and costs dropped), we witnessed a massive uptake of RFID usage, particularly in the retail sector.

In my last post, I talked about how the Internet of Things (IoT) is also helping to improve master data accuracy by gathering real-time information on everyday objects, from machines to cows.

But what about that staple of master data, customer or party data? How can we maintain its accuracy?

A glimpse of what is possible exists whenever we sign up for new social media accounts and other online apps. We now have many personal data stores in the form of our personal online presence via sites like Google, Facebook, Twitter and so on (here's an example of multiple social media/email signup options, from Canva). By granting access to these "personal online hubs," we are in effect mapping any future transactions to a far more reliable master data source.

The information contained in these hubs is of limited value to most businesses. But there is considerable benefit in having a more accurate identifier for us in the form of our preferred, and current, email addresses.

Where things get really interesting is the introduction of more advanced personal information management systems that grant businesses (or whoever we specify) access to our personal data along the lines of a subscription model. You can subscribe to our data, only if we permit it. What's more, we can decide what level of access to grant.

This shift from mastering an abstract of our data to hooking directly into personal data that we as consumers manage is truly game-changing. And it's not some distant pipe dream. For example, the UK government continues to move forward with its midata initiative while strengthening the powers of personal data privacy and compliance laws.

With many of the leading UK banks are signing up to the revolutionary idea of personal master data via the midata scheme, it's clear that as consumers we're hopefully going to have more control of our own information assets. I believe this trend will spread worldwide as the benefits are realised.

This is good news for businesses. This added insight will allow new customer segments to be discovered and will afford greater precision when designing the types of products we need as consumers.

From an MDM perspective, this may allow data practitioners to finally eradicate those duplicated silos and mismatched surrogate sources.

It seems like the future of personal data management may just be around the corner.

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