Master Data Management and Data Quality

This chapter reviews some approaches to master data management (MDM), and considers how MDM can be utilized as yet another tool to help maintain the quality of enterprise information. Organizing, integrating, and sharing enterprise information are intended to create a truly integrated enterprise, and this is the challenge of what is known as MDM: integrating tools, people, and practices to organize an enterprise view of the organization's key business information objects, and to govern their quality, use, and synchronization and use that unified view of the information to achieve the organization's business objectives. The excitement about ways to resolve variances that have evolved over many years leads to relatively high expectations for what can be accomplished using MDM. And though some of the expectations for MDM may exceed what is generally achievable, MDM does provide a laboratory example of the implementation of data quality techniques and practices for managing a high quality data resource. Therefore, it is important to review the basics of MDM and examine its relationship to the data quality management program. MDM techniques are used to support business-critical activities that are reliant on high quality data and good data management practices. By employing MDM in support of data quality, immediate gains can be achieved despite the need for the long-term commitment.