Why User Experience and Master Data Management go hand-in-hand

Despite the growing criticality of master data within the context of a core SAP environment, many master data management planning programmes are widely acknowledged as too high risk for the potential end prize or future state reward. However, enterprise data growth has continued to accelerate at an unparalleled pace, meaning rich, clean data is becoming ever more critical to fuelling daily SAP business functions. First, let’s remind ourselves what exactly is master data management (MDM)? According to Gartner (2017), master data management is a;

“technology-enabled discipline in which business and IT work together to ensure the uniformity, accuracy, stewardship, semantic consistency and accountability of the enterprise’s official shared master data assets.”

It can therefore be assumed that business users own master data and are also primarily responsible for overall data quality and governance. In fact, during day-to-day operations, they are often the front-line “guardians” for overall data governance within the SAP environment. So, for an MDM planning initiative to be a complete success, business user adoption is a critical success factor, right?

From our experience, many MDM planning initiatives are often guilty of being too heavily focused either on the engineering of the underlying technology or an excessive IT-driven formula for the overall desired MDM solution state. The ongoing success of the MDM programme is often compromised, due to a lack of formal acknowledgement of the end-user aspects and the overall usability importance in maintaining “quality” master data records. This highlights the need to consider user experience and master data management together.

Whilst such MDM planning initiatives address “error-laden” data in the relatively short term, they fail to address the underlying upstream cause of “polluted data” in the very first instance. The focus therefore fails to ever shift from detecting and correcting user data errors to preventing user data errors from ever occurring in the first instance. This again underscores the importance of integrating user experience and master data management.

At Bluestonex, we have been heavily focused on developing a more “user-centric” master data management solution for SAP data models. Through adopting a user-centric mindset, we were able to help organisations understand and appreciate that finding and correcting user errors was both non-value-adding work and, more importantly, very costly. Moreover, working more collaboratively with both business key users and IT helped leverage preventative measures at the very source of data quality issues. This approach to user experience and master data management ensures better outcomes.

By simply presenting business users with simplified SAP data entry screens that are accessible for data capture across any device type and only focused on the key aspects of the overall SAP master data model, data quality issues are immediately addressed from the very outset. Moreover, user empathy and simplification help deliver greater solution adoption within the wider business, helping preserve ongoing user accountability for maintaining less onerous SAP master data objects. Thus, combining user experience and master data management proves essential for maintaining high data standards.

UX and Data Management have always gone hand-in-hand. Discover more about the rich history of user experience here.