Guide For Beginners To Understand Master Data Management (mdm)

By Author: Dave
Total Articles: 7
Comment this article

Master Data Management is an information management system, that offers opportunities for data quality management experts and master data governance experts. Master Data Management is a need for creating strategies for data quality management and toolset.

Let's understand what is MDM?

Experts define MDM in various ways and it is up to you which expert's definition you understand better. Here are some prominent definitions by experts:

1. “MDM is the practice of defining and maintaining consistent definitions of business entities, then sharing them via integration techniques across multiple IT systems within an enterprise and sometimes beyond to partnering companies or customers” — Philip Russom PhD. Industry Analyst, TDWI

2. “MDM is a technology-enabled discipline in which business and IT work together to ensure the uniformity, accuracy, stewardship, semantic consistency and accountability of the enterprise’s official shared master data assets. Master data is the consistent and uniform set of identifiers and extended attributes that describes the core entities ...
... of the enterprise including customers, prospects, citizens, suppliers, sites, hierarchies and chart of accounts.” — Gartner

Why Master Data Management is becoming sought after?

The following points will help you to understand the reason behind MDM's popularity.

1. The Impact of MDM issues on the Businesses - Master data is among the most important data that an organization holds, so it is imperative that problems of the past be fixed; minor errors in master data can lead to viral problems when propagated across a federated network. In the last decade, enterprise MDM has gained significant recognition for its ability to differentiate businesses.

2. Escalating Complexity and Globalization - A Master Data Management system goes right to the point of why Information Development is necessary. Organizations are becoming more and more federated, with more information and integration on a global scale than ever before. A successful approach relies on reducing complexity. From a data management perspective, globalization created a variety of additional challenges. It also includes issues relating to multilingual and multi-character sets, as well as a requirement for 24x7 data availability from global operations.

3. All Sides See a Major Opportunity - System integrators and product vendors can take advantage of MDM as it is a big, complex problem. Data hubs, which are part of MDM, have been developed as a new MDM technology. Each information management vendor has a strategy for solving the problem, and application-centric vendors (which started the MDM trend) see this as a new area of opportunity for integration and applications. Organizations with MDM issues are also taking a similar approach: confronting a variety of information management challenges provides them with a clear framework for framing the issue.

What Challenges does Master Data Management Present?

The following key points can help you to understand the challenges presented by MDM.

1. It is often difficult for people to decide where to start, prioritize, and focus
2. A lack of information governance (stewardship, ownership, policies) leads to high levels of complexity across an organization
3. The problem of domain values is especially challenging when they are stored across a number of different systems, especially product information
4. In many large organizations, customer data is stored in multiple systems across the enterprise, resulting in a high degree of overlap in the master data.
5. Many organizations have complex data quality issues related to master data, particularly for customers and address data from legacy systems.

About GlueData: GlueData is an independently owned and managed company. The company is a global data and analytics consultancy that assists SAP clients in mastering their data. The company provides the best data management tool, data management tools, data migration services, and master data management services with help of their data migration consultants and experts. Our SimpleData Management methodology is aimed at reducing the complexity of data governance by focusing on what is most important from a data domain or objective point of view.

https://gluedata.com/master-data-governance/