Master Data management

Avoid semantic asymmetry in your master data.

Master data management doesn't stop with managing references and identifiers. Manage your master data business vocabulary, facts and rules to move from knowing that two business concepts are the same to knowing what these two concepts mean..

IT Projects

Move beyond identifiers and attributes

According to Gartner, master data is a consistent and uniform set of identifiers and extended attributes that describe the core entities of the enterprise. Master data is frequently used across multiple business processes. Master Data Management is the set of processes and tools for organizationally defining and managing the master data.

Clearly, master data concerns your key business assets, such as customer, project, account, product, ... Already in 1989, Charlie Bachman mentioned that any large organization will have a couple of thousands of them. But how do you start with master data management when different definitions hinder consolidated views of these assets?

Manage your master data on a business level.

It is more than clear that these key business assets need to be semantically described: what defines a customer? What other concepts are related to a customer? What terms are used to refer to a customer in different speech communities? What business rules are applied in various settings on customers? Because of their more central role in an overall data environment (i.e., as opposed to transactional or analytical data), it is highly important to get things understood.

By clarifying the semantics of the concepts that form your master data, you obtain an organizational understanding of this data, while also readying it for use in data services (such as data translation and data validation services). As such, business semantics help you in achieving the value of master data: cost savings through removal of duplicated, invalid and outdated data, increased revenue because of consistent views across systems and overall improved competitive advantage through better control of your data.

Benefits

Reduce risk and costs, improve business / IT alignment, and increase your Master Data Management project's succes by:

  • Removing interpretation conflicts,
  • Avoiding unnecessary debate,
  • Involving the business in defining and governing your master data definitions,
  • Leveraging these business definition on your data integration and middleware infrastructure to reduce integration complexity and costs,
  • Increasing governance and compliance.