Master Data Management in Practice: Achieving True Customer MDM

MDM Approaches and Architectures

Master Data Management (MDM) is about bringing master data together to facilitate the employment of master data management services—such as data governance and stewardship; data quality, metadata, hierarchy, and overall data lifecycle management—and ultimately, to serve as the single source of truth for the business. Customer MDM focuses on the customer data domain in particular and its associated properties, such as company name, tax ID, addresses, contacts, accounts, and company hierarchy.

In addition to data domains, such as customers, products, partners, and suppliers, data inside a company can also be classified as operational or nonoperational. Operational data is the real-time collection of data in support of a company's needs in their daily activities. Nonoperational data is normally captured in a data warehouse on a less frequent basis and used for business intelligence (BI). This particular classification of data is relevant in this context because it can be used to distinguish most common MDM initiatives.

Although the very essence of implementing MDM is in the appliance and fine tuning of MDM practices to fit the enterprise architecture and business model, MDM implementations as a whole can generally be categorized into three major types of initiatives based on its primary focus being operational or nonoperational data:

1. Analytical MDM: address BI

2. Operational MDM: address business operations

3. Enterprise MDM: address both BI and ...