Andrew WhiteI spied an interesting article last week in the InfoManagement blogs. It was, MDM Data Quality as a Process, by Jim Ericson. I thought it was interesting for a couple of reasons. I thought the title was hinting at a ruse: is MDM the same as data quality? Does data quality that is oriented as a “process” (whatever that means, become MDM? The title did not square with how MDM is generally defined, or so I thought. The quote that caught my eye was:
“…MDM projects harmonize after the fact, that they pull from the source system, they merge and match, they run rules and check results on the back end.”
This was in reference to a specific user implementation of MDM, apparently. I see a lot of this type of activity, and I would not call this MDM. I would call it data quality activity, or a data quality project: You do something “after the fact”, to clean the data up, as oppose to change the process that created the data in the first place. ‘Real’ MDM is more focussed on the process change AND data quality. Data quality is a capability that has to be applied.
Analytical MDM is all about cleaning up the master data after event; post transaction; downstream, in a data warehouse in support of building reports etc. Operational MDM is all about cleaning the data source (which COULD include, the point of authorship), and also about cleaning up the processes by which the poor quality data would have been created in the first place. That is the main difference between the two efforts.
Also, MDM is not a project. Projects have an end or complete data; MDM does not. MDM is a way of managing certain types of data – so it does not “end”, it just changes, and continues to change as the business changes.
Overall the article goes on to clarify that the description was an MDM “case study” and the article did represent MDM fairly, but I was not quite “on board” with the earlier part, as you can see above. Seems like the author wanted to create a little hype in order to drive hits to his site. Well, we are all subject to that little sin now and then…
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Category: Analytical MDM Data Quality MDM Operational MDM Tags: Analytical MDM, Data Quality, MDM, Operational MDM
