Abstract:

Banking institutions highly demand real-time delivery of quality operational information for reporting and analytics purposes. Business intelligence and data management are thus proving to be two of the must do activities, for an organization to improve its decision making and performance management. Conversely, Business Intelligence (BI) and Master Data Management (MDM) are activities with challenges and issues, as financial organizations grapple with ways to make informed decisions that align with their projected business targets and goals. In this paper, the argument is that a profound understanding of master data management, as an activity, is vital to the delivery of real-time quality information, and subsequently an improved business intelligence. To this point, this paper explores and describes how an understanding of MDM activities may improve business intelligence in a financial bank. In this paper, MDM and BI are seen as activity systems. However, this paper focuses on the MDM activity and not the BI activity. Activity theory is used as a lens to analyze the activity system. The paper concludes with a conceptualized framework for an improved BI through master data management.