Since recently attending the Gartner MDM Summit, reading the latest report on MDM Trends from Forrester, and speaking with several customers, a few trends are starting to emerge:
- There is no one single technology that will help organizations solve all of their MDM challenges
- While some MDM products are supporting multiple domains, they are still either customer-centric or product-centric
- Analytical style of MDM is gaining in importance, and
- The common challenges across all data domains and hub styles are data integration and data quality
At Informatica, we have been working with many customers that are seeing these same trends as well. They are selecting different approaches and tools for customer master and product master, sometimes even different tools for operational and analytical MDM applications. But the common threads are data integration and data quality:
Data Integration
- Access to multiple systems inside and outside the firewall
- Ability to handle multiple latencies from real-time to massive batches
- Tracking the metadata history, lineage, and audit trails
Data Quality
- Profiling source system to understand what you are starting with
- Identity Matching to detect duplicates
- Address Validation for all countries of operation and customer locations
- Cleansing and Standardization to ensure data consistency and accuracy across all attributes
- On-going monitoring and data quality scorecards to bring continual visibility to the program
When you look at the Informatica solution set you will see that we provide the capabilities that span these requirements. It’s an opportunity to help our customers be more successful by laying a foundation for MDM that provides a consistent integration layer across all data domains while applying data quality to existing data and having those same data quality rules applied at the point of entry.
What do you think? Is having a consistent foundation for all MDM projects important?
