Master Data Management

Master data management (MDM) comprises a set of processes and tools that consistently defines and manages the non-transactional data, or the reference data, entities of an enterpise business organization.

The objective of MDM is to provide processes for collecting, aggregating, matching, consolidating, quality-assuring or validating, persisting and distributing such data throughout an organization to ensure consistency and control in the ongoing maintenance and application use of this critical business information.

MDM processes identify the data sources where they can collect descriptions of these data entities. In the course of transformation and normalization, administrators adapt descriptions to conform to standard formats and data domains, making it possible to remove duplicate instances of any data entity.

Such processes generally result in an organizational MDM repository, from which all requests for a certain entity instance produce the same description, irrespective of the originating sources and the requesting destinations.