The Master Data Management Endgame

The Master Data Management Endgame

or How I learned to stop worrying and love federation
A paper by Andy Hayler published April 2009

Master data management (MDM) has emerged as a key area of information management in the last few years.  Initially much of the architectural debate was about whether to be data domain-specific or not – “one hub and for customer and a separate one for product?” – but since around 2006 the industry has increasingly listened to its customers and realised that organisations want a uniform approach to all their master data.  However there is still a significant divide about the style of implementation, with some vendors specialising in certain areas, and some confusion has arisen around terms such as “operational MDM”, “registry” and “analytic MDM” used for various approaches to implementing MDM. This paper argues that there is a second architectural dimension that has not had enough attention paid to it, and that is the one of a centralised versus federated approach to MDM.The white paper has 16 pages.