Introducing MDM

MDM is the discipline of determining and maintaining a single source of truth for shared data across an enterprise. As you can probably imagine, maintaining multiple copies of the same information across an IT enterprise is inefficient and can lead to data inconsistencies. Unless people and technology are 100% aligned, maintaining multiple copies of the same data is virtually impossible. Siloed businesses (where each business division is effectively separated in terms of people and technology) suffer from data inconsistencies, and the quality and classification of data they hold is often flawed. These scenarios require bringing together the data held by different systems into a data master, or single source of truth.

A single source of truth can be visualized conceptually as follows:

Figure 3.1 – Bringing data held in different systems to form a single source of truth

An example of inadequate MDM was realized by myself recently, and...