MDM Data Architecture: Unify, optimize, and accelerate
Every enterprise has its unique requirement for an MDM architectural hub because they come with different barriers to overcome and different goals to prioritize. There are various architecture models that can be leveraged while setting up a productive MDM environment.
However, ensuring that your MDM fits into your IT landscape requires a complex data architecture model because there are no just-plug-it solutions to ensure a seamless transition. First, you must align your business goals with your infrastructural capabilities (integration, middleware, modeling, etc.) and budget constraints, if any, for major technology overhauls involved. It is also essential to weigh in other organizational factors like your enterprise’s management structure, governance model, vendor policy, etc.
Questions to ask before kick-starting the architecture
Hence, your MDM data architecture must not only be agnostic to your vendor selection, but also the technology that drives your product, solution, or support function. Before you start building the architecture, here are a few questions to ask:
- What are your short-term and long-term business cases for MDM?
- Are your service level agreements cohesive across the enterprise?
- Has your data governance program been recently updated?
- Have you centralized your IT operations, or are there management silos?
- Do you follow specific middleware standards to ensure data quality?
MDM data architecture patterns
Data architecture patterns provide the prescriptive steps to manage the quality lifecycle of the managed master data.
1. Collect and Consolidate from any number of data touchpoints into the master data
2. Refine and enrich the data based on authenticity, compliance, and quality
3. Merge and manage the data with accurate records
4. Share the data with multiple applications
Popular MDM architecture styles
· Consolidated: An easy-to-setup yet one-way hub that comes with enterprise-wide reporting
· Registry: A stub record-based consolidation of records that are mapped to attributes in source systems
· Coexistence: A dual approach that connects different sources with a golden record system
· Centralized: One-stop-shop hub for MDM and source systems — integration with custom-authoring applications and web services
Questions to ask before kick-starting the architecture
A stable MDM system’s underlying foundation is that it acts as a trustworthy and flexible single source of truth. No matter the internal or external business application, the MDM should be an authoritative approach for data consumption and distribution — and it should also act as an all-encompassing layer to bring in data quality and integrity. It should maintain master data attributes by putting the data through cleansing, matching, and enhancing algorithms before passing it along to the source systems. Even when the data is shared from the MDM system to data lakes and warehouses for transformation into insights.
Where the flexibility becomes vital is your MDM data architecture’s ability to adapt to evolving regulations or growth expectations. Your MDM system must be responsive to event changes such as changes in business rules or data protection policies by triggering actions based on the master data attributes. It is also crucial to add a review layer for approval to create sustainable and continuously-improving governance.
· Quickly decouple data from applications and processes and contextually share with relevant business users
· Minimize data management costs while increasing data accuracy
· Enable agility for seamless modifications to master data schema or addition of new master data elements
· Automatically comply with data privacy regulations and other unique region-specific or business-specific regulations
· Bring in extensive system and application interoperability while working with vendor software integration or stitching together new and emerging technologies
· Harness current environment to support reusable frameworks and services
To know more about Master Data Management services & solutions, please visit our website — https://www.aspiresys.com/digital-enterprise-integration/master-data-management-services
Also if you have any questions related to MDM strategy, best practices & implementation, please write to info@aspiresys.com
Read our other articles on MDM here:
Why Master Data Management is your enterprise’s golden ticket to business growth
Top 5 data challenges CIOs face and how to solve them with MDM
