Business operations depend on transaction processing systems, and BI and analytics increasingly drive marketing campaigns, customer engagement efforts, supply chain management and other business processes. But many companies don't have a single view of their customers. Commonly, that's because customer data differs from one system to another. For example, customer records might not be identical in order entry, shipping and customer service systems due to variations in names, addresses and other attributes.

Similar inconsistencies can also occur in product data and other types of information. Such issues cause business problems if critical data can't be accessed or is missed by end users. Master data management programs help avoid that by consolidating data from multiple source systems into a standard format to provide the needed single view of business entities.

Many organizations struggle to design and implement a process for managing master and reference data, making the proliferation of data across applications and databases increasingly difficult to manage and use.

This presentation will present an overview of master data management and offer steps for designing an effective approach to any organization that wants to realize the benefits of master data management – and some challenges to success.

Areas Covered

Who Should Attend

CDO, CIO, CTO, data management professionals, data governance professionals, data stewards, data quality management professionals

Topic Background

Master data management (MDM) is a process that creates a uniform set of data on customers, products, suppliers and other business entities across different IT systems. One of the core disciplines in the overall data management process, MDM helps improve the quality of an organization's data by ensuring that identifiers and other key data elements about those entities are accurate and consistent, enterprise-wide.