Master data management (MDM) is the technology-enabled discipline that business engages in to build uniformity and accuracy in creating and maintaining master data.
By extension, the discipline and technologies associated with the domain need to meet certain minimum expectations in support of the practice.
These capabilities include, but are not necessarily limited to:
- Alignment with the business objectives and data maturity of the organization
- Data role and responsibility assignment and designation
- Hierarchical data definitions and master data relationships
- A robust and consistent approach to data naming in order to support convergence
- The ability to classify data elements that are common across datasets and data views
- Secure and reliable storage with organizationally relevant data partitioning
- Adequate documentation to meet the needs of usage, insights, auditing and reporting
- The ability to define data rules with key measures and metrics for data quality
- Collaboration and decision workflows
- Data synchronization and syndication
- Duplicate detection, resolution and if necessary, prevention.
- Data contention management through automated or manual data stewardship
- Respect for local, regional, national and international laws for data collection, storage and use