Ever get billed by your bank for car insurance when you don’t own a car? Does your cell phone provider fail to send you a bill, yet keeps asking you for your address? Sounds like they both have a Master Data Management problem. The recent emphasis on regulatory compliance, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and mergers/acquisitions has made the creating and maintaining of accurate and complete master data a business must-do.
Most software systems have lists of data that are shared and used by several of the applications that make up the system. For example, a typical ERP system as a minimum will have a Customer Master, an Item Master, and an Account Master. This master data is often one of the key assets of a company. It’s not unusual for a company to be acquired primarily for access to its Customer Master data.
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