MDM and Enterprise Architecture

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Editor’s Note: Another great guest post by Joan Lawson, a talented enterprise architect who worked for one of my clients in the software industry in 2003. For more information on Joan, please see her LinkedIn profile — Dan Power

Master Data Management (MDM) may be one more Three Letter Acronym (TLA), but it’s a central point in the practice of Enterprise Architecture. Together with SOA-based applications and a robust middleware platform, an ideal architecture is readily achievable.

Let’s take an example using party data including customers and prospects. Party data may have a “system of initial record” in any of the many ERP or CRM applications that a company may have.

A message with new party data can be written to the integration platform from the CRM application. Based on business rules, a Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) system can orchestrate the data management services in the MDM hub, write the clean party data into the MDM hub, and then message the clean data to the other ERP and CRM applications.

Ditto with product master data.

In this example, customer and product dimensions in the data warehouse are managed by the “source of truth” – the MDM hub. And the fact data for the warehouse (such as quotes, orders, and service events) can be sourced from the OLTP applications.

For those interested in real time monitoring of transactional data, consider placing that data on the integration platform as well. A Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) platform taps into that data to monitor it against KPIs. And once again, the MDM hub provides the “source of truth” for the master data.

The end result? Clean, consistent master data, whether used in the business applications, the data warehouse and business intelligence platform, or in real time business activity monitoring.

Please let us know by commenting here or on the MDM Community if you’re using MDM as part of your enterprise architecture.