by Angela Guess
David Borean has written an article for the Infotrellis blog regarding proper Master Data Management practices. He writes, “For many years I’ve been saying that the one thing all MDM clients have in common is that the quality of data in their source systems is not as good as they thought. Over the past several years I’ve found that all MDM clients have a second thing in common: they are unaware of the quality of data in their MDM hub and they don’t know how the data is changing. This is surprising since an MDM hub contains your most critical business data that is used in real-time processes and analytics across the organization. How can you govern your data when you don’t know its trend in quality, how it is being used and how it is changing over time? This is flying blind.”
He goes on, “Popular MDM products such as IBM InfoSphere MDM, Informatica Siperian and others don’t have any practical capabilities to analyze and report on the master data. Yes they all have a very strong focus on entity resolution so that you can de-duplicate data but they all fall short on addressing and tracking other types of quality issues (aka as policies), reporting on how the data is changing over time, reporting on who is using the data and how they are using it and so on. These MDM products do come with some reporting capabilities but they usually come with disclaimers that they may negatively impact performance and operations of the MDM hub and therefore should be used with care, which is a strong indication they are not the appropriate place for these activities. This is for a couple of reasons.”
