Master Data Management
The Role of Master Data Management in Achieving Regulatory Compliance
Data privacy has become one of the most significant concerns for businesses and customers alike in today's data-driven markets. Because although businesses can offer personalised services with customer data, in the wrong hands, this data can have devastating implications – reputational, financial, and emotional. As a result, regulatory bodies around the globe have developed different regulations and frameworks – like GDPR, HIPAA, or CCPA – to protect customers and hold businesses responsible for the data they store, collect, and use.
Although there is no uniform regulatory framework or enforcement standard for privacy compliance, each of these frameworks has certain elements in common. And these highlight the fact that effective data governance and regulatory data management are the keys to ensuring compliance. However, effective data governance is a company-wide task, and you need to understand your company’s data ecosystem and landscape to achieve it. This is where master data services and master data management policies come into the picture, as they allow you to centralise the cross-functional data, avoid data silos, and avoid any possible privacy pitfalls.
How do master data services impact compliance?
Compliance, in the broadest sense, is making sure your data management policies hold up to the standards of authorities and stakeholders. And as such, data quality, integrity, and security are the cornerstones of data privacy compliance. The first step to achieving this is eliminating data silos and making sure you have a unique centralised record of your enterprise data. MDM systems give you a single point of reference when it comes to operational, customer, and regulatory data. This makes it easier and less expensive to audit the master and regulatory data management policies while securing and standardising the data across multiple applications, data warehouses and other sources of data.
Additionally, a well-designed master data management policy and architecture can help you integrate the privacy regulations into your master data services to ensure ongoing compliance even if you add applications or data interfaces in the future. As a result, you can get a significant growth advantage in comparison with less agile and data-forward competitors.
Most modern master data services already implement a few of the common regulatory requirements across different privacy regulations, including:
- Removing duplicate data
- Ensuring data quality
- Achieve address enrichment
- Establish hierarchical and other relationships
Moreover, consolidated and unique data records in modern MDM systems make it easier for customers to exercise their “erasure rights” under GDPR and CCPA. Erasing user data, especially personally identifiable information, from multiple locations can be difficult to accomplish and verify. Consolidated records under MDM offer a unique point of reference for all relevant data to ensure compliance with the “right to erasure” across the enterprise.
Achieving data privacy compliance with master data management policy
Achieving regulatory data management and privacy compliance is not a straightforward process. However, cross-functional collaboration can help you build and adhere to a security framework to ensure compliance. The following steps can help you get started:
- Develop a data protection policy to outline your approach to privacy
- Undertake impact assessment to identify and mitigate potential data privacy risks
- Enforce measures to protect personal data
- Train employees on data privacy and protection best practices
- Establish SOPs and automation tools for data subject access requests (DSARs) and other personal data inquiries
Beyond privacy compliance
Master data services and master data management policies can help you go beyond just compliance and help you leverage your focus on data privacy and data use in proactive strategic initiatives. As customers become more tech-savvy and aware of privacy regulations, you can focus your marketing messaging on privacy compliance to stay ahead of the curve. This way, you can assure the customers that you have a customer-centric approach and are using their information responsibly to deliver a personalised experience. You can also go beyond just regulatory compliance and conduct regular third-party data privacy audits, incorporate compliance controls in data processes and architecture, and go the extra mile to ensure authorised data access.
The bottom line is if you fail to achieve data privacy compliance, you will have huge legal, financial, and reputational consequences. On the other hand, if you use customer data ethically and protect customer privacy, you can gain a competitive edge and build a loyal customer base. Partnering with the right master data services provider can help you take a holistic approach towards streamlining your data workflows and MDM architecture to ensure better control over enterprise data and privacy compliance without the time and cost-intensive manual processes.
For organisations on the digital transformation journey, agility is key in responding to a rapidly changing technology and business landscape. Now more than ever, it is crucial to deliver and exceed on organisational expectations with a robust digital mindset backed by innovation. Enabling businesses to sense, learn, respond, and evolve like a living organism, will be imperative for business excellence going forward. A comprehensive, yet modular suite of services is doing exactly that. Equipping organisations with intuitive decision-making automatically at scale, actionable insights based on real-time solutions, anytime/anywhere experience, and in-depth data visibility across functions leading to hyper-productivity, Live Enterprise is building connected organisations that are innovating collaboratively for the future.
How can Infosys BPM help?
Infosys BPM Master Data Management Solutions are the perfect tool to help you ensure business beyond disruptions. With over 2000 master data process specialists and consultants across the globe, Infosys BPM MDM services can help you streamline your business and data processes to improve operational efficiency, governance controls and regulatory compliance. Master data services ranging from MDM advisory, data quality diagnostic, and ongoing data hub maintenance, Infosys BPM can help you leverage the next-gen technologies for all your master data management requirements.
