Without a clear cut strategy for reconciling disparate data sources and normalizing databases, conflicting data can lead to problems for reporting and analysis, which will inevitably affect decision making. Many IT departments are turning to a master data management (MDM) strategy in order to establish a single version of the truth for enterprise reporting and analytics.
This note provides an overview of MDM. The topics to be covered include:
- What is MDM?
- What is master data?
- Why do enterprises need MDM?
- Types of MDM strategies.
- MDM architectures.
Deeper analysis of the above topics will followed up in subsequent notes.