I've been in many bands over the years- from rock to jazz to orchestra - and each brings with it a different maturity, skill level, attitude, and challenge. Rock is arguably the easiest (and the most fun!) to play, as it involves the least members, lowest skill level, a goodly amount of drama, and the least political atmosphere. Moving up to jazz and 
orchestra adds more members and takes more skill, maturity, discipline. Unfortunately, it also adds politics and bureaucracy – and as the pic shows, the tendency to make a strange face when you're rockin' out.
Organizations can also be seen in this way. It's great to be on a agile, rock-star team with less politics, but unfortunately, that's not always the case. Sometimes, you're playing first chair trombone in the orchestra, the second chair french horn is playing in a different key from the wrong songbook, and the strings don't want to rehearse on Saturdays.
What's that lead to? Cacophany. Discord. What's a conductor to do?
In the data world, we face the same discord. But the result isn't a bad sound. It's bad data that doesn't do what we expect it to do – or doesn't meet the business needs. What's an enterprise architect, who serves as an ad hoc conductor, to do?
The new release of SAS MDM brings harmony to data discord. Multiple sources, inconsistent standards and definitions, inaccurate reports, and a lack of governance are enough to derail any band, or any organization. Not only does SAS MDM help organizations silence the noise caused by duplicate and inconsistent data, it enables them to combine disparate data sources into one harmonious view.
Here are four new MDM enhancements that will help your data sing:
- Big data access and integration.
- Harmonize your view across traditional source systems like Oracle or Teradata and emerging sources like Hadoop and Impala with new big data access capabilities.
- Source system harmonization, load dashboard and improved matching
- Data stewards have more control over how data is prepared, managed, loaded, and synchronized by using the Source System Dashboard and Tools.
- Create the best view of your customer or product with improved cross-field matching functionality.
- Integrated reporting and improved visualizations.
- Gain more insight into data quality, hub health, remediation or performance issues with the bundled SAS Visual Analytics, Administration and Reporting (VAAR) engine.
- Visualize and track more meaningful relationships with new relationship attributes.
- Improved governance and policy enforcement.
- View, create and manage business and technical metadata with the patented SAS Business Data Network.
- Govern who has access to view, edit glossary data and leverage workflow-driven templates to create terms.
- Trace data lineage from source to consumer and all the steps in between with the patented SAS Lineage.
With SAS MDM's phased approach, embedded data quality, pervasive data governance, and agile data management platform you can get everyone playing from the same songbook, and deliver your MDM solution in a matter of months, not years. Now, that's a song everyone can sing.
