Manage the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth!
July 4, 2012
Is Master Data Management still important? Have you ever received mail for someone who used to live at your address? Or received a phone call for someone that used to have your number? Or received the same piece of mail more than once from the same sender? If you answered “no” to any of those questions, maybe you haven’t seen the effects of no MDM. However, my guess is you probably answered “yes” to at least one of them!
As computing begins to move out of the enterprise and into the Cloud, and as Big Data starts to invade our systems and analytics, MDM is even more important than ever before. Knowing where the truth lies before data is taken outside the enterprise firewall is critical for security and control. As big data from social networks, sensors, and transactional systems is combined for analytics, knowing what to analyse and making sure the right thing is being analysed is important.
MDM uses people, process, and technology to help organizations know where the truth is in their master data objects, how it is maintained, and who is responsible for its accuracy. MDM technology will keep a record of master data copies across corporate databases; so that “John Doe” is the same “John Doe” in the CRM system in the Cloud as the “Doe, John” in the ERP system on premise.
If your organization doesn’t have the same data objects distributed across multiple systems, you may not need MDM technology; however, a process to handle the quality of master data within systems is still part of an MDM program and needs to be considered for long term data management.
The truth always lies somewhere in between, unless you have MDM in place and then you know exactly where the truth is.
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