Sometimes you have to get small to win big. SAS Data Management breaks solution capabilities into smaller chunks – and deploys services as needed – to help customers reduce their total cost of ownership.

SAS Master Data Management (MDM) is also a pioneer in "phased MDM." It's built on top of a data quality and data governance platform, resulting in reduced services integration costs and faster time to value. Customers can quickly make changes to existing processes, add new ones or easily integrate the technology with other solutions.

The latest release of SAS MDM adds pervasive data governance, improved usability and streamlined enterprise integration and performance to the mix.

1. Pervasive data governance
   MDM incorporates workflow-based remediation, which helps data stewards, data quality and MDM administrators route and resolve data issues from within a common UI in collaboration with a larger team. For example, if a customer service representative sees that a customer is 144 years old in the database, it's pretty clear there's a data quality issue. This remediation issue can be surfaced and routed to the correct person to resolve it and check the birthdate.SAS MDM also provides a unified role-based web UI called the Data Management Console to increase business user engagement and foster better alignment between business and IT users. In addition to workflow, deep entity linking allows for an external application to bring up the Data Management Console with a specific customer pre-loaded onto the screen. A data steward could use this ability to contact an MDM admin with a specific entity for inspection by emailing a link to that specific URL. It's the difference between saying "Google it" when explaining a concept to someone versus sending them a direct link to the concept in question.
2. Improved usability
   Other hidden costs of MDM solutions include application integration, user training and proper alignment of the right people at the right time. The Tool Registry allows for simple customization and speeds application integration within the existing UI at the point of decision. For example, you can click a button to employ address verification directly inside of the MDM UI; a Google map can be brought up to speed making a decision about the best route to take to meet delivery requirements; or a web service pulling the most appropriate promotions that can be made in real-time can easily be embedded in the UI. Finally, improved multi-domain hierarchy support is included, which allows for ad-hoc or automatic generation of hierarchies based on rules as well as visualization of relationships and hierarchies.
3. Improved enterprise integration and performance
   SAS Data Management employs a microservice architecture. Similar to SOA, this means that instead of monolithic executables, bundles of pre-tested services are deployed in tandem. For example, the capabilities used to remediate a data quality issue in the SAS Data Quality solution are the same as those used by the SAS MDM solution.  The Data Management Console user interface is similarly shared across multiple solutions. Likewise, broad performance improvements have also been made and metadata can be shared with both SAS and third party solutions.

Other features include embedded market-leading data quality and data governance capabilities such as profiling, cleansing, standardizing, managing a business glossary, business and technical metadata visualization and web-based process orchestration of jobs.

Master data management is a complex task, and it requires a tool that is flexible and adaptable to your environment. As you can see, SAS continues to make great strides in complementing our extensive business analytics, visualization and reporting solutions with market-leading data management capabilities.