Federated MDM Data Domains - A Perspective
By Madhukar N.S.M.
You might feel that the word “federated” is generally associated to data models and database designs. Federated MDM Data Domains means a union of “disparate" data without which the enterprise MDM hub is incomplete. I will take the example of a Customer MDM enterprise hub and elaborate further.
In a customer hub, the typical data stored is the customer demographic, address data etc. An enterprise will have the various products sold, services, marketing campaigns, offers and interactions and to keep track of this data is highly critical. The nature of data for instance offers and interactions data is so unique that it might not required to store directly in the core customer hub. There are two options when building a Customer Hub, either store the entire data on a central hub or federate the data. Based on the enterprise size, complexity and the need the Central versus Federated approaches are finalized in an MDM implementation. Federated data domain is implemented in case of huge data volumes, high accessibility, highly performing and higher scalability and low maintenance windows available in production.
Let me throw some more light on the Federated data domain. Take the earlier example of customer, services, offers, campaigns and interaction. Imagine Customer is in the center of the universe, with the planets being the services, offers, campaigns and interaction data (except that this disparate data is tied with the customer ids. Technically, Federated data domains follow a hub and spoke architecture where at the hub the core entity information is stored and in the spokes the federated data is stored. Federation can be extended to data and business services where data can be sourced from multiple sources. The services federation will orchestrate the required business data from the federated data domain to be catered to various LOBs and channels in the organization. Major advantages of the federated data domains are high scalability, reliability, high system availability.
If you would like to read more about this concept, please visit my point of view Paper at http://www.infosys.com/crm/idea-center/federated-data-domains.pdf. This paper also discusses the implementation challenges and a case study.
About the Author
Madhukar is a Senior Consultant working on end to end solutions in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Master Data Management (MDM) areas. He has led various green field implementations of CRM solutions for clients in Banking, Retail and Education verticals. With a strong CRM and ERP background, Madhukar now works on Customer Data Integration / Master Data Management Solutions for Banking and Financial Services Institutions.
