by Angela Guess
David Loshin recently raised the issue of customer definition in terms of creating a singular view of MDM concepts. He writes, “The continuous reverberation of discussions about the definition of customer may ring in your ears, but the fact remains that when assembling a strategy for customer data integration and master data management (MDM), at some point you have got to fish or cut bait. Competing definitions are a stumbling block in the master data integration process, especially when seeking to refine a master model that can accommodate the various sources of data.”
Loshin continues, “I’ll give you a quick minute to review what I said in the last sentence, and hopefully you will raise the objection that I often raise when attempting to resolve the ‘customer definition’ issue, which is whether the objective of master data modeling is accommodating the data suppliers or the data consumers? I’ll suggest that perhaps the root cause of the ‘single definition of customer’ problem derive from a misunderstanding of basic intent for managing master data.”
He adds, “Many people think that MDM is about providing a ‘single version of the truth’ resulting from data consolidation. But from my purist perspective, that is a lofty and perhaps unattainable goal. Rather, we might consider MDM as a set of disciplines for providing a unified view of the information associated with a conceptual master data domain. The difference between the first perspective and mine is that with so many different definitions and presumptions associated with our data domains (such as ‘customer’) it is extremely difficult to differentiate what is really meant by ‘truth.’”
photo credit: www.huntfishguide.com
