MDM Goes Beyond the Data Warehouse
Rich Sherman writes:
Enterprises are awash with data from customers, suppliers, employees and their operational systems. Most enterprises have data warehousing (DW) or business intelligence (BI) programs, which sometimes have been operating for many years. The DW/BI programs frequently do not provide the consistent information needed by the business because of multiple and often inconsistent lists of customers, prospects, employees, suppliers and products. Master data management (MDM) is the initiative that is needed to address the problem of inconsistent lists or dimensions.
The reality is that for many years, whether people realized it or not, the DW has served as the default MDM repository. This happened because the EDW had to reconcile and produce a master list of data for every data subject area that the business needs for performing enterprise analytics. Years before the term MDM was coined, MDM was referred to as reference data management. But DW programs have fallen short of providing effective MDM solutions for several reasons.
Interesting take on the problems faced in master data management projects. (Yes, I added index entries for MDM and “master data management.” People might look under one and not the other.)
It occurs to me that there may be transitions towards a master data list that includes understanding data systems that will eventually migrate to the master system. Topic maps could play a useful role in creating the mapping to the master system as well as finding commonalities in other systems to be migrated to the master system.
Documenting the master system with a topic map would give such a project one leg up as they say on its eventual migration to some other system.
And there are always alien data systems that have different data systems from the internal MDM system (assuming that comes to pass), which could also be mapped into the master system using topic maps. I say “assuming that comes to pass” about MDM systems because the “reference data management” if implemented, would have already solved the problems that MDM faces today.
IT services are not regarded as a project with a defined end point. After all, users expect IT services every day. And such services are necessary for any enterprise to conduct business.
Perhaps data integration should move from a “project” orientation to a “process” orientation, so that continued investment and management of the integration process is ongoing and not episodic. That would create a base for in-house expertise at data integration and a continual gathering of information and expertise to anticipate data integration issues, instead of trying to solve them in hindsight.