MDM Business Rules to Ensure Accuracy

Leveraging MDM Business Rules For Accuracy and Clarity

MDM users make mistakes. Surprised? The truth is that humans are always the weakest link in any data-management system. In fact, human error is responsible for more data breaches than malicious attacks—around 60 percent compared to the nine percent caused by hacking and insecure web pages combined.

Business rules range from the fundamental, such as required fields and uniqueness requirements, to the critical, such as hierarchical checks and overwriting fields. Sometimes referred to if-then-else statements, business rules go hand-in-hand with the MDM UI—when a user enters data incorrectly, you want the UI to let them know. It’s vital to create your MDM business rules around your business, not your platform.

Basic MDM Business Rules

You can avoid most data-entry errors by building in safeguards. Basic business rules include:

• Required fields to prevent users from omitting critical data-field entries
• Uniqueness requirements that prevent users from entering duplicate data; examples include one weekly target per customer and one product shelf-life per SKU
• Accuracy checks to help prevent the entry of data inaccuracies; examples include checking entered location, preferences and contact information match addresses, client preferences and contact info stored in the MDM database
• Completeness checks to ensure users enter all required data; for example, if a data field requires sales data for the past six months but a user enters only five months, they receive an alert and must correct before moving forward
• Consistency checks to make sure all data entered in an object matches all other instances of the data stored across the MDM platform
• Conformity requirements to require data to conform to the required format; examples include “YYYY/MM/DD” and possible values for percentages, such as data entered cannot exceed “100”

Business rules help ensure users enter accurate data completely and consistently across the platform.  A well-designed MDM User Interface is critical too. Check out MDM User Interface Design Best Practices to see my tips.

After your business rules are in place, you need to move on to safeguarding your data with MDM Security Permissions.

Angel Abundez is VP, Solutions Architecture at DesignMind.