Overlooked Aspects of Data Governance: Workflow Framework For Enterprise Data Deduplication

Data quality in companies is decisive and critical to the benefits their products and services can provide. However, in heterogeneous IT infrastructures where, e.g., different applications for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), product management, manufacturing, and marketing are used, duplicates, e.g., multiple entries for the same customer or product in a database or information system, occur. There can be several reasons for this, but the result of non-unique or duplicate records is a degraded data quality. This ultimately leads to poorer, inefficient, and inaccurate data-driven decisions. For this reason, in this paper, we develop a conceptual data governance framework for effective and efficient management of duplicate data, and improvement of data accuracy and consistency in large data ecosystems. We present methods and recommendations for companies to deal with duplicate data in a meaningful way.