In my previous post, I outlined the main components needed for a phased approach to MDM. Now, let's talk about some of the other issues around approaching MDM: data governance and the move to enterprise MDM.

Where does governance come in?

Throughout your MDM program, it's important that deep expertise and rigor go into the planning phase, whether from within your organization or without. The SAS Data Management Consulting organization provides deep data governance and MDM planning expertise, which helps you minimize project risk and align IT initiatives with business objectives through targeted MDM or data governance engagements.

The business data glossary and reference data management components of our SAS Data Governance offering can help to ensure that business terms (like patron) and related attributes (like address, loyalty card level, and name) are related to technical metadata, which provides the specific tables or fields where this data resides. By providing a way to manage business terms and reference data, SAS Data Governance can be used to align business and IT.

For example, if you're trying to create a master entity for patron, business users can leverage the web-based user interface to define the patron entity attributes before exporting this information into MDM Foundations. MDM Foundations then provides for profiling and feeding cleansed data in batch for a single entity (like patron as well as customer, product, etc.) at departmental volumes. Entity matching rules (grouping by address, Social Security number and name attributes) can be visually created and experimented with using this "data quality sandbox," compressing the iterative data exploration cycle.

Stepping up to Enterprise MDM

When the organization requires real-time SOA access, higher volume, enterprise multi-domain MDM (single view of both product and customer, for example), relationship management across those domains, and server-based deployment for performance and centralized access, you can move up to the SAS MDM solution. And you can build on an existing data management platform.

No other MDM vendor can provide this phased approach to delivering business value. MDM solutions often don’t have embedded data quality and therefore rely on integration with products from other companies, sometimes recently acquired, to provide this essential benefit. It’s also much more challenging to find a professional services resource that is knowledgeable of multiple solutions since they often came from the recent acquisition of several different companies.

What if you already have an existing MDM footprint? SAS Data Quality can provide cleansing and standardization that is embedded as part of a real-time web service from operational system feeds or as a batch process when creating a staging file for import into an existing MDM solution. This may also be an opportunity to look at data quality vendor consolidation. Chances are you are using multiple data quality vendors throughout your organization for everything from address standardization and verification to data profiling to CASS certification. Why not consolidate into one unified user interface that can also be leveraged as the underpinning of your MDM solution? The same skills your data quality developers build can be leveraged to create or extend the MDM load jobs for the hub.

Wherever you are in the process, SAS Data Management solutions can help accelerate your time to value, reduce risk, and deliver value to the business with success at every stage.