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1. Introduction
Data quality issues have become topical as the amounts of data have rapidly increased. Data silos – i.e., disparate organizations, systems, and applications – create segregated information. This results in duplicate, incomplete, and inaccurate data, which leads to inappropriate analytics and, ultimately, inaccurate business decisions (Fatehali, 2011). Problems with data quality and reliability are evident.
Master data identifies and describes central business objects in an organization (Baghi et al., 2014; Allen and Cervo, 2015; Singh and Singh, 2015). Common examples of master data domains are customer, product, and vendor. High-quality master data are a prerequisite for companies and their performance (Hüner and Otto, 2009). Master data management (MDM) aims to solve data quality issues by focusing on business processes, data quality, and information systems (IS) standardization and integration (Silvola et al., 2011). It targets the challenges that stem from data fragmentation, stand-alone systems, inconsistent processes, and complex architectures (Fatehali, 2011).
MDM is a collection of data management practices that are orchestrated by key stakeholders, participants, and business clients (Loshin, 2009). It uses business applications, information management methods and data management tools to implement policies, services, and infrastructure to support the integration and sharing of accurate, timely, consistent, and complete master data. MDM is not an application system but rather an organizational function (Otto, 2012a).
Establishing MDM within an organization is a complex process with numerous steps and viewpoints (Loshin, 2009). The design should always be organization-specific (Weber et al., 2009). Prior research has not examined what kind of organizational issues can be identified during this process and at what stage.
This paper identifies obstacles and issues that an organization may encounter when establishing its MDM function. The issues that are considered as MDM specific are then observed more closely. Also, the dependencies between the issues are observed. The data were collected though an ethnographical study of a municipality over a period of 32 months. The study provides new understanding of the challenges in establishing and developing the MDM function within an organization.
The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews the previous research. Section 3 and 4 present the case study settings and research methods. Section 5 presents the findings. Section 6 discusses and summarizes the issues. Finally, Section...