by Angela Guess
William McKnight recently shared his insights regarding Master Data Management on the ERwin company blog. He wrote, “Master data management (MDM) has not seen the meteoric take up in organizations that many other technologies have. It has been a much more gradual, steady and unabated progress through the corporate world, starting with the Global 2000. It is a scalable progression. Lessons learned are being passed down. MDM is built on value add to an organization, not hyperbole. It’s decidedly less sexy than ‘big data.’ Master data management is ‘little data’ in that context. Unlike many big data projects, MDM projects are locked in on how they deliver business return on investment. This may have slowed the adoption in the short run, but will serve the industry best for long run.”
He continues, “While big data focuses on the technical aspects of the solutions because they are very interesting and stand in contrast to how things have been done, MDM is a conglomeration of things we have done for a while such as data modeling, data integration, workflow and data quality. These are packaged in a unique way, making them most applicable to today’s problems of real-time data quality and operational integration. The goals of MDM have been pursued by many organizations prior to there ever being an MDM industry and it’s still pursued without actual MDM software in many cases, although we usually don’t call that MDM. The vendors certainly would not, but if you are seeking a wide-scale model to be populated and used in real-time, you are approaching MDM.”
