Master Data Management in Practice: Achieving True Customer MDM

Achieving an Effective Enterprise-Wide MDM Model

As companies look to implement MDM across multiple data domains, this naturally creates the need to examine how to best coordinate and prioritize multi-domain activity and focus, particularly in regards to technology needs, quality improvement priorities, and demand for budget and IT resources. As with Customer MDM, the other data domains will typically start their MDM initiative by creating a charter and data governance team to establish the foundation needed to move forward. Although much of the MDM context and needs will be unique within each MDM domain, there are many common elements of MDM that can begin to compete and cause unnecessary redundancy across multiple domains if they are not effectively coordinated.

Coordination of these common elements may initially fall to an executive steering committee expected to oversee multiple MDM initiatives, but over time this responsibility is likely to shift to an enterprise MDM or Enterprise Data Governance type program office where a more specific team and set of resources are responsible to help facilitate and support cross-domain MDM needs by providing various tools and services. Figure 12.1 provides a simple example of an enterprise MDM model.

Figure 12.1 Enterprise MDM Model Example

The concept and charter for an enterprise MDM program office makes sense from a coordination and ...