Information Technology managers face a dilemma given the current economic climate: budgets are being cut, yet there’s no tolerance for decreases in IT service levels. Under such circumstances, how do you maintain or improve service levels, and continue to run the business efficiently? Smart IT decision-makers are seeking out technology investments that can help to accelerate cost reductions while streamlining business processes. Master Data Management (MDM) is exactly this kind of investment.

MDM ensures that critical enterprise data is validated as correct, consistent and complete when it is circulated for consumption by business processes, applications or users. But not all MDM technologies can provide these benefits. Only an integrated, model-driven, and flexible MDM platform with easy configurability can provide rapid time-to-value and lower total cost of ownership. Consider the ways a flexible MDM platform can reduce the following costs:

#1: Interface costs
Simplify expensive business processes that rely on point-to-point integrations by centralizing common information.

#2: Redundant third-party data costs
Eliminate duplicate data feeds from external data providers (Dunn & Bradstreet, Reuters, etc.).

#3: Data cleanup costs
Integrate data from disparate applications into a central MDM system, making it possible to cleanse all data across the enterprise in a single system.

#4: Outsourced cleansing costs
Eliminate the need for outsourced manual cleansing by automatically cleansing, enriching and deduplicating data on an ongoing basis, then centrally storing it for future use.

#5: License, support and hardware costs
Centralize data across the enterprise to reduce the amount of, or even eliminate, redundant data stores and systems.

#6: Custom solution development and maintenance costs
Replace antiquated custom masters with a configurable off-the-shelf MDM platform to save significant development and maintenance costs associated with band-aiding custom solutions.

#7: Information delivery costs
Eliminate reporting errors, expedite audits and improve compliance by a) managing a single version of the truth along with a history of all changes, and b) delivering this information to any reporting, business intelligence or data warehouse.