Leveraging Information and Intelligence

I have to be honest with you, it's tough to find good posts and articles around master data management, or MDM, these days. Just not the hype you see in other spaces. However, when I come across some gems I'll make sure to post them here with comment.
The most recent gem, as an article by Larry Dubov who highlighted the need for relationship management when approaching MDM. I could not agree more with the concept, and the approach.

"As more companies deploy master data management solutions, there has been an increasing demand for even more value-added capabilities from master data. One of the most significant is the demand for MDM solutions to manage relationships between parties including individuals, individuals and households, individuals and corporate entities, informal groups and organizations. Understanding relationships between parties and products as well as product hierarchies is critical for enterprises."

The idea is to create an abstract few of the data that's more logical, and thus organized around the relationships rather than the common semantics. This really should be the focus of MDM.

Larry presents an approach:

"Companies that want to understand relationships need to migrate from an account-centric or product-centric view of the enterprise to a customer-centric or relationship-centric view.

At a high level, there are three ways to build entity relationships and hierarchies:

• Use an external trusted source of relationships (or multiple trusted sources) and build internal relationships and hierarchies by comparing in-house data with the trusted sources.
• Create and set rules that will be used by the systems to automatically infer entity relationships. These rules can be based on common attribute values, (e.g., people sharing the same home address are defined as a household). The attributes can be matched exactly or probabilistically by applying the same probabilistic methods that were used earlier for entity resolution.
• Develop relationship matches and links manually using graphical interfaces that enable relationship building."

The idea is that a sound relationship management strategy that leverages all three approaches enables enterprises to create an MDM solution that balances the use of advanced algorithms with business user and data stewardship input, according to Larry. Thus, the ability to understand how MDM fits across companies, agencies, and verticals.

Sounds advice, and clearly a gem in the world of MDM.