by Angela Guess
Philip Russom has begun a three-part series on the core activities of master data management, the first activity being business goals. He writes, “Most organizations have business goals, such as retaining and growing customer accounts, optimizing a supply chain, managing employees, tracking finances accurately, or building and supporting quality products. All these and other data-driven goals are more easily and accurately achieved when supported by master data management. That’s because most business goals focus on a business entity, such as a customer, supplier, employee, financial instrument, or product.”
He goes on, “Some goals combine two or more entities, as in customer profitability (customers, products, and finances) or product quality (suppliers and products). MDM contributes to these goals by providing processes and solutions for assembling complete, clean, and consistent definitions of these entities and reference data about them. Many business goals span multiple departments, and MDM prepares data about business entities so it can be shared liberally across an enterprise.”
Russom adds, “Sometimes the business goal is to avoid business problems. As a case in point, consider that one of the most pragmatic applications of MDM is to prevent multiple computer records for a single business entity. For example, multiple departments of a corporation may each have a customer record for the same customer. Similarly, two merging firms end up with multiple records when they have customers in common.”
photo credit: Dan Kamminga
