MDM and Operational Business Intelligence

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Editor’s Note: Another in the series of “MDM and …” guest posts by Joan Lawson, an enterprise architect who I’ve known since 2003.

For more details on Joan, please see her LinkedIn profile — Dan Power

There’s been a resurgence lately of writing about Operational Business Intelligence.

It’s a valuable concept. Operational BI gives people in the enterprise an up-to-date view of performance against the key metrics that drive the success of the organization, so they’re better informed and can more readily determine corrective actions when needed.

All the vendors and analysts identify success criteria to include Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) engines, business rules, and high end presentation capabilities.

But they’re missing the #1 criteria for success… high quality master data.

In Operational BI, the real time transactional data will most likely be sourced from two or more business applications.

The historical source of data, for comparison’s sake, can be the data warehouse.

But for the master data, where is the “source of truth”? If you’re going to fast track your business monitoring, be sure to include an architecture for real-time master data management to provide top quality dimensional data.

Please let us know your thoughts by commenting here or on the MDM Community on your experiences in using MDM in concert with Operational Business Intelligence.