Why all the buzz around MDM?

If you’re like me, and subscribe to a number of BI and Dashboard-related newsletters and industry reports, you've probably noticed the increased discussion around Master Data Management (MDM).

For those of you still wondering, MDM is the name given to the collection of processes required to create and maintain consistent and accurate data. It's a recent term, defined in Wikipedia for only about two years now. And it describes what is an altogether daunting task for most organizations.

So why is it important? And why the discussion now?

Certainly the importance of an MDM initiative is clear—it's a wish list that almost every business intelligence analyst and CIO shares: If only all of our data and fields and naming conventions were consistent.

Lack of consistency is an ongoing challenge in a world of ever-increasing reporting, compliance and data governance requirements. And I believe the sudden increase in discussion has its roots in both the increase in SaaS adoption and generally tighter integration between most enterprise systems. BI and dashboards used to be single-source, homogenous reporting platforms. But that is changing, as customers want to consolidate and understand their data from a holistic end-to-end view. With this trend in mind, you can see where MDM comes into play.

Because MDM is most effective when applied enterprise wide, it’s not an easy task. And it can be very time consuming. It’s also fraught with future risk: How can you accurately predict what your future data and reporting requirements will mean for your fields and data-naming conventions?

Here's another interesting point, and possibly cause for some of the recent interest. Generally speaking, Extract Transform and Load (ETL) is a process that acknowledges and deals with the fact that various data warehouses and enterprise applications have different naming conventions and definitions. MDM, on the other hand, deals with the issue of data trust head-on, ensuring data that conforms right from the start. In other words, could MDM eliminate much of what ETL is doing today?

At the end of the day, we all just want “one version of the truth”. And to me, that’s buzz worthy.