by Angela Guess
Loraine Lawson of ITBusinessEdge recently reported, “A common trap for customer data MDM projects is to build what The Data Warehousing Institute calls a ‘roach motel MDM architecture.’ Data checks into the hub from operational applications such as ERP, CRM and financial systems, but when it comes out, it’s routed downstream to (often siloed) databases. That’s a nice trick for analytics, but it’s not really addressing the ‘big picture’ goal of MDM of creating a ‘golden record’ of customer data across your system.”
Lawson continues, “Bottom line: This one-way approach to master data (data checks in but doesn’t check out) won’t work when you need to fix your reference data in one place and then publish it to the various operational applications, warns a recent TDWI report on MDM best practices. You’ll see a lot of discussion about MDM hubs in the tech publications, and that’s why I’m bringing this up: TDWI is making an important distinction here. Lots of MDM approaches will be called ‘hubs,’ but that’s confusing and it may account for why some MDM initiatives pay off and others don’t.”
