Business Intelligence Network business intelligence resources

Blog: Colin White

« BI Spending Number 1 on Merrill Lynch CIO Survey | Main | SQL Server 2005 and Business Score Card Manager Finally Launched »

More About MDM and MDI

Thanks for all the feedback on my MDM post. It shows how much interest there is in this topic. I agree with all of the comments sent to me. To answer some of the questions and comments I thought I would write a separate blog.

As I mentioned before, MDM is an application. It is about integrating reference data. This data may be used for business transaction processing or business intelligence processing or both. Customers will either custom build these applications (which is the main approach used at present) or buy a packaged solution from a vendor.

Vendors will either develop their own packages or acquire a company that already has a package. The winners here (as with all packaged solutions) will be those vendors that can bring the most domain expertise to the problem. Discussions I have had with companies about how to integrate master customer data, for example, have really demonstrated to me the complexity of the business problem.

Some vendors will bring out generic MDM applications that can be customized and extended for specific business domains, whereas other vendors will offer domain specific solutions.

The challenge for vendors (and their customers) will be to integrate these applications into an integrated enterprise architecture. This architecture may employ techniques like data consolidation, data federation and data propagation, and technologies such as ETL, EII and EAI. This underlying architecture can be thought of as a master data integration (MDI) framework for supporting MDM applications.

  Posted by Colin White on October 21, 2005 6:20 PM |

Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)