Master Data Management

Forrester defines MDM as a business capability enabling an organization to:

• Identify trusted master data. MDM defines and/or derives the most trusted and unique “version” of important enterprise data (e.g., customer, product, employee, asset, material, location, etc.). Often, this enterprise data is captured, maintained, and used across disparate systems and business processes on both sides of an organization’s firewall.
• Leverage master data to improve business processes and decisions. MDM incorporates this master version of the data within functional business processes (sales, marketing, finance, support, etc.) that will provide direct benefit to employees, customers, partners, or other relevant stakeholders within an organization. Master data alone provides little value. Hence, anticipation of how the data will be consumed by other applications or systems within the context of a business process provides the most value.

(Gartner) MDM is the consistent and uniform set of identifiers and extended attributes that describe the core entities of the enterprise and are used across multiple business processes. Some examples of core entities are parties (customers, prospects, people, citizens, employees, vendors, suppliers or trading partners), places (locations, offices, regional alignments or geographies) and things (accounts, assets, policies, products or services). Groupings of master data include organizational hierarchies, sales territories, product roll-ups, pricing lists, customer segmentations and preferred suppliers. MDM is a workflow-driven process in which business units and IT departments collaborate, cleanse, publish and protect common information assets that must be shared across the enterprise. MDM ensures the consistency, accuracy, stewardship and accountability for the core information of the enterprise.

CDI is the combination of the technology, processes and services needed to create and maintain an accurate, timely and complete view of the customer across multiple channels, business lines and organizations, where there are multiple sources of customer data in multiple application systems and databases.