With the latest trends in service orientation from an architectural and from business services offering perspective, it has become a high priority for an organization to define and implement a master data management strategy. The enterprise must look to standardize on management of the transactional, master and transactional data, but often forgotten is the unstructured data and metadata. A comprehensive MDM strategy must include policies and safeguard for unstructured data and metadata, which often provide invaluable information and enable better decision making.

The following list is intended to provide some high-level guidance and is not intended to be a methodology or end all be all solution.

When I think about an MDM initiative we should at least touch on the following:

• Identify the sources
• Identify the consumers
• Identify the primary (potential secondary sources)
• Collect and analyze metadata
• Select team members to provide stewardship
• Create the master-data model
• Select the toolset
• Retrofit systems based on MDM architecture
• Roll-out and support strategy

In addition to these concerns, we also have to deal with additional complexity if any of our business functions are sourced external to our organization. For example, we might be using some component from NetSuite or SalesForce, or we might want to try out SAP’s ByDesign.

When evaluating an MDM Solution we have to keep in mind the distributed nature of the enterprise and service oriented nature of the next generation enterprise. Some Key aspects we need to evaluate on a potential solution are:

• Technical Architecture
• Compatibility with SOA
• Support for multiple Business Unites/Entities
• Support complex relationships and hierarchies
• Support for regulatory compliance
• Data Governance and Version Management
• Usability, Efficiency
• Security
• Integrationwith our current Workflow tool