Master Data Management - A Key Strategic Enterprise Trend
This study was done before the onset of the current economic downturn, and shrinking IT budgets are likely to take a toll on enterprise implementations, as IT budgets mirror the decline in business spend. All the same, global corporations need to stay competitive and prepare for the future. A significant cause of the subprime crisis was insufficient assessment of risk and inadequate information sharing between lines of business in the enterprise. This occurs because information exists in multiple disparate systems and the processes are not interlinked, leading to inefficiencies and lost sales.
Little surprise then that the Forrester report indicated that enterprises are looking to implement effective collaboration strategies, leveraging service-oriented architectures and master data management. These technology implementations are critical for business users to be able to get a single view of trusted data and ensure that there is a consistency in the way different units implement business processes.
Companies that focus on achieving a high degree of data quality and standardized master data will be better able to deliver the right product to the right customer and at the same time ensure effective compliance and regulatory reporting. This also enables the enterprise to leverage and rationalize existing IT infrastructure, to "sweat the assets", as it were.
The end state of a successful master data management (MDM) intiative is a cleansed, real-time repository of master data like customers and products. This repository is updated from multiple source systems and publishes its information to downstream systems like data warehouses and operational systems, leading to closed loop data quality.
Comments
Yes, Customer Data is a key Enterprise MDM subject area. There are others such as product, price, etc. that are very relevant too.
Posted by: Sandeep Rao | February 11, 2009 3:10 PM