Master data management

Master data management (MDM) is a technology-enabled discipline in which business and information technology work together to ensure the uniformity, accuracy, stewardship, semantic consistency and accountability of the enterprise's official shared master data assets. Organisations, or groups of organisations, may establish the need for master data management when they hold more than one copy of data about a business entity. Holding more than one copy of this master data inherently means that there is an inefficiency in maintaining a "single version of the truth" across all copies. Unless people, processes and technology are in place to ensure that the data values are kept aligned across all copies, it is almost inevitable that different versions of information about a business entity will be held. This causes inefficiencies in operational data use, and hinders the ability of organisations to report and analyze. At a basic level, master data management seeks to ensure that an organization does not use multiple (potentially inconsistent) versions of the same master data in different parts of its operations, which can occur in large organizations. Other problems include (for example) issues with the quality of data, consistent classification and identification of data, and data-reconciliation issues. Master data management of disparate data systems requires data transformations as the data extracted from the disparate source data system is transformed and loaded into the master data management hub. To synchronize the disparate source master data, the managed master data extracted from the master data management hub is again transformed and loaded into the disparate source data system as the master data is updated. As with other Extract, Transform, Load-based data movement, these processes are expensive and inefficient to develop and to maintain which greatly reduces the return on investment for the master data management product. There are a number of root causes for master data issues in organisations.