What role does master data management (MDM) play in laying the ground work for service oriented architecture? Apparently, a very crucial role – SOA in and of itself holds little value to an organization unless it provides the capability to open up information to the enterprise. As is the case with SOA, successful MDM is a silo-breaker, invoking collaboration across the enterprise. This demands adroit governance that not only closely links new initiatives to what the business needs, but also assures that the information populating SOA-based services is accurate, timely, and consistent.

A panel of leading experts in a recent Webinar explored the emerging role of MDM as an enabler of SOA. As Aaron Zornes, chief research officer for the MDM Institute, put it: “SOA and MDM are part and parcel, they’re hand in glove, they’re complementary, they’re co-dependent.” Services that access specific data, “such as ‘identify customer’ or ‘retire customer,’ are all SOA services that are part of new applications as well as to the retrofit of the existing legacy systems,” he explained. “For many organizations, customer integration projects or MDM programs are the first step into SOA – even for the IT organization.”

Master data management focuses on creating and maintaining a consistent, accurate and standardized view of reference data in business systems across the enterprise. The challenges and opportunities related to MDM are similar to those of enterprise data warehouses and service oriented architecture – which can lead to enterprise transformation, but also require deeper enterprise involvement than typical IT or data management initiatives. That calls for effective governance that can provide enterprise support for MDM initiatives, as well as keep things on track.

The enterprise focus is key to the success of MDM, panelists emphasized. “Where MDM and also data governance can be helpful is really bringing business and IT together to address how information can better serve business objectives,” said David Stodder, vice president of Ventana Research. “That right there is the distinction between the back end issues the stem from ETL and data warehousing, that may have started with a good business impulse, but end up getting a little disconnected.”

For example, enterprise IT departments need to serve multiple communities across the enterprise that require different types of data. “One of the issues with data warehousing is how to serve central communities with one enterprise data resource like a data warehouse,” he said. “It’s an extremely difficult problem, because different user communities have different ways. They define data differently, and have different rules they have to adhere to, including regulatory issues in how to use the data and protect data. MDM can be instrumental in bringing business and IT leadership together, giving IT a better idea of how to support more than one user community.”

Panelists agreed that MDM serves up a “gold standard” that ensures that information accurately reflects business conditions or assets from across the enterprise. SOA does not deliver value – or even function properly – when services are delivering fragmented information, or lack business content. It’s often not enough to establish good governance for SOA or other initiatives without well-managed enterprise data.