Master Data Management: What is it? Why its important? September 14, 2007
Posted by mukundmohan in News.trackback
Our friend Andrew White at Gartner has been busy. He’s published two reports that are worth a read if you are a Gartner customer. First on Role of Metadata in Master Data Management and the other on Four dimensions of MDM.
A primer: Master Data Management - What is it?: Any company has multiple databases of information. A CRM system for sales & marketing customer data, a support system with support related customer data, an ERP system with customer order data etc. Also see Wikipedia for a detailed explanation.
The goal: Merge all the disparate, oft-conflicting records you have on customers and transactions into one authenticated master file.
To make an analogy. I have a facebook profile, a linkedin profile, a Pownce profile and a Twitter profile. I have friends in all of them. Besides this I have my friends who dont use these services in my Outlook. Would it not be great to have a system that will allow my to integrate all these and keep them de-duplicated and consistent so I know one true picture of all my friends, my interactions etc? That’s what apparently OpenID does for you, but Master Data Management would keep all these databases synchronized.
There is a good book on this topic by Alex. See below. Not worth buying in my opinion, but if you get a chance to swap it for another book in your library do it.
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Great post!
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