What is master data management?

Master Data Management (MDM) is a further foundation to successful Data Management. Master data is the consistent and uniform set of business identifiers and attributes – whether customers, goods, suppliers, or other business entities – formed from potentially many disparate sources across the enterprise, into a single view.

Delivering consistent master data with a high degree of quality such that it can be reliably trusted to underpin the application of the wider enterprise data, has been a constant challenge for organisations. Not just mastering data at a point in time but mastering for the lifetime of the data, dealing with the ongoing ingestion, profiling, cleaning, enrichment, standardisation, consolidation and distribution of the conformed data. A lack of native Azure tooling (Microsoft only offering Master Data Services as a component of SQL Server) or concerns over on-going licensing costs, has led to “build over buy” being a common approach. However, this approach requires upfront development time, on-going maintenance effort and can result in tooling that may not be intuitive and is poorly adopted. To overcome this challenge, Adatis has partnered with expert MDM tool, CluedIn.