Master Data Management in Practice: Achieving True Customer MDM

Data Integration and Synchronization

Just about every Customer MDM implementation will start with a data integration effort. Companies looking for MDM solutions probably have silos of data all over the enterprise. Therefore, it is necessary to look at the data as a whole to be able to identify duplicates, create relationships, build intelligence, minimize maintenance costs, control access, and everything else that is directly or indirectly related to maintaining a high-quality repository with trusted and governed data. For that reason, data integration is the foundation for everything else.

Data integration in itself does not necessarily mean physically moving data. As noted in Chapter 1, certain MDM architectures such as data federation and registration will simply create references to data that exists somewhere else. The concept of data integration in this book is about having an overall view into the entire company data, independently of where it is physically located. Nonetheless, physically moving data from one system into another is also very common, either as a one-time data migration effort, or on an ongoing basis, such as data warehouse systems. Data migration is explained further in this chapter.

Anyhow, on typical MDM programs, integrating data will likely encompass varying levels of physically and virtually joining data. Furthermore, Customer MDM is about having an integrated view into customer information. Other entities and/or transactional information dependent on ...