Most master data management (MDM), data quality, and accompanying data governance efforts prioritize customer, account, and product data over all others. Certainly, industry-specific exceptions exist; for example, energy, utility, and oil and gas companies place a high priority on asset and location data domains, while investment management firms prioritize securities. But exceptions aside, a recent Forrester survey of 298 business process management (BPM) and MDM professionals across industries found that 83% prioritized customer data, 61% product data, and 53% account data. And coming in at 44%, the next highest priority: the red-headed stepchild of the MDM “party” (pun intended — apologies for that), employee data!

It’s no surprise that customer/account and product data-centric MDM programs get the lion’s share of funding, executive sponsorship, and prioritization within most organizations. This data is the lifeblood of your customer engagement and supply/distribution chain, with quantifiable impacts to both top- and bottom-line success, and can be positioned as a major competitive differentiator. But even more relevant, those MDM efforts are often driven by sales, marketing, finance, operations, or risk management functional organizations — all of which are typically better funded than many human resource (HR) teams, especially when it comes to IT budgeting. Of course, this isn’t always the case, and many large enterprises spend millions of dollars optimizing their HR systems infrastructure. Applications supporting learning management, performance and talent management, recruiting, time and attendance, benefits administration, compensation planning and analysis, and organizational charting and employee directories all require high-quality employee and organizational data.