DataFlux

There seems to be a lot of debate around about data governance and MDM, return on investment on MDM etc. going on at present. However the discussion is still a data oriented and IT oriented one with several of my clients still asking for help on MDM business cases at present. So I thought I would look at what MDM could potentially do for an enterprise and see if it implementing MDM might have wider implications. I was amazed at how long my list of what MDM could potentially integrate with started to get.

MDM systems could potentially:

• Integrate with CRM, eCommerce, ERP and PLM applications to offer shared access to enterprise master data
• Prevent duplicate customers being created in CRM applications
• Prevent duplicate products being created in PLM applications
• Synchronise master data across all applications for consistent trusted data everywhere via integration with enterprise service bus (ESB) technology
• Offer MDM services to all systems that need them in an industry standard way via web services
• Supply master data hierarchies to BI systems and in particular to OLAP cubes to use in multi-dimensional analysis
• Allow users to search master data to see what exists in the context of a process activity
• Integrate with Office applications (e.g. Outlook) to allow users to search on, use and maintain master data from within Office
• Be used to generate data quality rules from master reference data using the valid values for master reference data
• Generate a hierarchical taxonomy from master data hierarchy values which could then be used to tag web content, documents and BI reports. This is hugely powerful because it means that unstructured content, BI and structured master data all of a sudden are tied together, retrievable as a complete set of information and searchable as a complete set of related information
• Provide hierarchical facets to search engines so that once you have got back a search result you can narrow down the search result set using master data hierarchies to zoom in on what you are looking for
• Integrate with portals to support access to master data by data stewards from all over the enterprise

Personally, I think this is all doable. Therefore, MDM has the potential to become a massive lynch pin not just in creating trusted data but also in opening up easy access to all kinds of content by linking it to search and taxonomy. Also we often speak about data quality helping in building MDM systems but what about the other way round i.e. MDM systems being used to generate data quality rules for a master data quality firewall? That makes lots of sense. There is so much potential here and we are clearly in for exciting times ahead!