From the course: Introduction to Career Skills in Data Analytics

Master data management

From the course: Introduction to Career Skills in Data Analytics

Master data management

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- Have you ever been working with data and you see customer addresses all have different ways to reference the region? In some countries, we have states, provinces, or districts. And when they're used in the data and entered by different people, they may reference the full state, province, or district name or they may list the abbreviation. Data like our customer and their address information would be considered master data. We want everyone in the organization who works with this data to have the same consistent list of information. When an organization takes the time to design rules around the master data, this will also inform all the data analysts of what types of transformations apply. Using tools like Power Query, either in Excel or Power BI, we can easily make these corrections and save these steps so that as new data comes into our reports, it will conform to the standards. Master data is not just address information, though. It could be project names or product names. If we call a project something different, then it makes it difficult for the data analyst to report on this information with ease. There are tools that exist to support large scale organizations with master data management. But I would argue no matter the size of your organization, if you do not have a plan in place, the analyst will be dealing with it all the time. So as master data management aims to keep a clean, complete, and accurate list of master data for the organization, if you don't have master data management, then you will need to develop a plan to keep a nice, consistent list of data when you report. Let's take products, as an example. Two companies have merged. They sell the exact same products, but in both companies, they're not called the same name. As a data analyst, you can use a table that holds every possible name and the correct name so that when you report, you can leverage joints to give yourself a master table of information. When a new name pops up, you'll have to address it in your master table, but it's better to have that table than to not have it. Your data set being clean and complete is one of the most important parts of any project. Just remember that all of your data skills can apply to many types of data scenarios, not just the analysis or the presentation part of the job.

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