Master Data Management - a business solution to business problems


Master Data Management is emerging as a mainstream solution to some of the harder business problems. Let us look at a short scenario:

The company WorkWorks is quite succesfull and is expanding into an international presence in - currently - 9 countries in Europe. This has been accomplished - among other things - by way of mergers and acquisitions. The it systems portfolio is large with a mix of systems, where overlap and redundancy of data is frequent. WorkWorks is actively working on a number of it integration projects. These include a common customer relationship platform as well as an enterprise data warehouse.
Some of the challenges that WorkWorks is facing, is that data simply do not fit together across the enterprise. The definitions, the meanings as well as the actual values of simple stuff like Prod
MD Inventory
uct Category and much more are quite different. What is more is that this situation is not documented - and comes as a surprise to many people. This leads to many misunderstandings as well as data quality problems in the integration projects.
To deal with these issues, WorkWorks launched a Master Data Management initiative. They carefully modelled core business data, starting with the customers, and subsequently provided values for all important classifications such as customer groups, segments an
MD Sales
d so forth. The purpose was clearly to eliminate the annoying quality problems and misunderstandings, which previously threatened the expansion of the business as well as cross selling etc. The IT- department provided a Master Data Management platform with everything that was needed, including workflows and approval cycles for master data.
WorkWorks have now successfully implemented master data for customers, and is aggressively moving forward into the product area. The new paradigm for dealing with essential business data is becoming business as usual.
The results are plentiful. Better quality of decisions, fewer mistakes and misunderstandings. Only one version of the truth about data and about business results. All of this translates to an improved bottom line and a more agile enterprise.
See? Master Data is not about IT - it is about business!

Check the 2 minutes guide to MDM here. And check my comments about MDM technologies here.