About Master Data Management

In today's business environment, it is becoming increasingly difficult to access current, accurate, and complete information about the people or entities for which information is stored across an organization. As organizations merge and grow, information about the same entity is dispersed across multiple disparate systems and databases, and there might be several different versions of the information of varying quality. Information becomes fragmented, duplicated, unreliable, and hard to locate. A single source of authoritative, reliable, and sustainable data is needed. As soon as data about the same entities begins to be stored in multiple departments, locations, and applications, the need for this single source becomes apparent.

Master Data Management (MDM) creates and maintains a source of enterprise data that identifies and stores the single best information about each entity across an organization in a secure environment. MDM is the framework of processes and technologies used to cleanse records of inconsistent data, analyze the state of the data, remove data duplication, call into question potential duplication, and maintain a system of continuous cleansing. Implementing an MDM initiative produces a complete and consolidated view of the entities about which information is stored, such as customers, patients, vendors, inventory, and so on. The MDM solution produces a single best view of the data. The single best view is referred to as reference data.

Core features of an MDM solution include data profiling, stewardship, standardization, matching, deduplication, and mashup. This combination cleanses data from the very beginning, identifying and rectifying data anomalies from the start and providing a system of continuous cleansing as new data is added.