To truly solve master data management (MDM) you need to understand how your organisation arrived at a situation where your business critical data is ‘mastered’ across multiple systems.

There is a danger of implementing MDM technology as yet another stop-gap solution without attempting to address the root-cause issues of master data proliferation. Many companies implement MDM as a tactical solution, with the goal to shut down or consolidate their legacy landscape in the future. The danger is that you simply create another silo of master data to coordinate.

So how did your organisation create an (un)mastered data problem in the first place?

One common cause is organisational. Over time your company may have acquired other competitors and partners or they simply aligned their business functions along organisational silos.

For example, in a telecoms company you may find systems and organisational structures aligning against service fulfillment, service assurance and billing vertical structures. Each of these verticals may contain a master record for customer that can easily get out of sync between systems. Sometimes telcos align with different parts of their transmission infrastructure, so you get silos for mobile, fixed line, inside plant, outside plant, core network and other areas forming.

As a result of this master data proliferation, telcos often discover stranded assets, unbilled revenue and a range of further data quality issues that all hit the bottom line.

To make MDM truly a reality you need to develop a transitional strategy for your legacy data landscape. You need to start building information architectures that support many departments and verticals within your organisation. This calls for an enterprise perspective of your data. What information will your company need to prosper in the next 5 to 10 years?

Legacy transformation also requires a robust data migration strategy as it’s so often the failure point of many a legacy transformation exercise.

MDM technology can actually play a key role in this migration exercise. By creating hubs and data services for your master data you can isolate the information from the application and start to create a true service oriented architecture. By redirecting the source of data flowing into these hubs post-migration you can effectively de-risk your data migration initiatives and bring value faster to the organisation.

MDM is not just about one piece of technology, it requires a different mindset about your legacy data landscape with a view to creating something long-lasting. MDM technology can support at every phase of this process but it’s foolish to think that you can achieve this without any legacy transformation.