some of these multibillion dollar organizations can be these days. I mean, just imagine managing

data for thousands of different products and 10’s of thousands of customers.

This would actually be really easy if everything held still and didn’t change. But in the

real world data is changing ALL THE TIME. Acquisitions are being done; corrections are

being made to faulty records, marketing departments are changing product names. And it starts

to look like IT is fighting a losing battle with the harmony of its corporate data.

To illustrate this, let’s pull a simple example from one of my previous videos. Imagine

a sales rep starts an order with a brand new customer, ===Now early on in the sales process

the sales rep carelessly entered in 401 6th Street as the customers street address instead

of the right address === which is 401 9th Street. This is no more than a === simple

typo on a computer keypad, but it happens all the time.

===The order enters into the organization and the process carries its course fulfilling

the customer request. And as this order get’s fulfilled=== this dirty data propagates into

the various systems that support this process. ===Now not everybody in the company falls

for the dirty data. In fact in this case === and astute Billing Department confirms the correct

billing address and=== enters it into their system.

So now that this problem has played out, let’s look at these data sources up close. As you

can see, none of the other order fulfillment systems know about the update made by the

accounting department. And if you’re processing thousands if not millions of transactions

every day, you can start to see how the critical factors of your business can get out of sync.

And this is only one example of how data can get out of harmony, there’s an infinite

number of other ways this can occur. Where this really becomes a mess is when the

data is needed. For example, imagine a product recall has to be made and a letter needs to

be sent out to each customer. As you reached into each system you’re going to find a

different list of customers. This is where an introduction to Master Data

Management (or MDM) would be appropriate. The goal of Master Data Management is to provide

synchronization to the most critical pieces of data in a company. Usually these pieces

of data are related to Customers or Products, but any subject matter that needs synchronization

could be a candidate. The first thing that MDM solutions do is provide

some sort of focal point. This is one place that the organization can identify as the

correct definition of customer, product, or whatever the subject matter might be.

The second thing MDM solutions do is produce the plumbing to synchronize the data between

this focal point and the various underlying systems which connect to it. In the geek world

we call this middleware. The third thing that MDM solutions need is

some way of addressing the quality of the data. This ensures that the data getting synchronized

is indeed correct. What can also help with this process is to include 3rd party data

sources as a way of validating the data quality and appending additional information about

your customer. Now all this together represents some really

amazing technology, but it’s essentially useless if it’s owned by IT. Business owns

the success of Master Data Management solutions. This means the business needs set up processes

for addressing discrepancies between systems, and some real executive sponsorship for enforcing

the difficult and sometimes political decisions. Intricity specializes in implementing Master

Data Management solutions, and guiding organizations in setting up the business processes to support

them. I encourage you to visit Intricity’s website and talk with one of our specialists.

We’re a committed partner in our customer’s success and a trusted enabler in simplifying

their complex problems. Which is the final critical component to a successful Master

Data Management solution.