The Master Data Management (MDM) Challenge

To ensure the enterprise-wide accuracy and consistency of essential business data, MDM seeks to develop, maintain and distribute definitive master data models and instances for key business entities like "product," "customer," "order," and "employee." Successfully implemented, MDM can help minimize the serious problems anomalous data creates, problems like:

• Inaccurate financial reporting
• Litigation risk and regulatory non-compliance
• Operating inefficiencies
• Missed sales and marketing opportunities

Increasingly Difficult to Implement

While the rewards of MDM can be great, implementation can be notoriously complex, especially given recent IT trends such as:

• The proliferation of enterprise data silos
• The interconnectedness of internal and external systems (for example, partner and supplier networks)
• The multiplication of information system entry points (Web, phone, mail, email, chat)
• The rise of self-service applications (e.g., online ordering and support)
• An increase in mergers and acquisitions

Improving MDM with CloudView

To help your MDM initiative succeed against this challenging backdrop, it is crucial to accelerate what is typically a multi-year timeframe, and to produce early, regular results to gain buy-in and maintain support. CloudView is a simple, low-cost tool for achieving these goals:

Instant Federated View

CloudView provides an immediate federated view of your data across all resources, demonstrating immediate value for your MDM project, and even enabling you to exclude certain entities (e.g., "product," "employee," "order") from your MDM system.

• Just Beginning?

  If you're just launching your MDM project, use CloudView to reap instant benefits by providing an immediate federated view of your data, and to simplify and accelerate each subsequent step in the MDM cycle (data collection, consolidation, cleansing and quality control).

• MDM Project Underway?

  If your initiative is already well underway, use CloudView's federated data view to assess your progress and data quality.

• And for Mature MDM Implementations...

  For established MDM projects, use CloudView to extend your system's reach to unstructured data (like email, Web pages, documents and multimedia files), and to greatly democratize the use of your master data assets through the rapid, non-intrusive development of search-based applications (SBAs).

Replacing MDM with CloudView

For small and medium sized organizations working with limited data volumes and sources, CloudView can even provide an appealing alternative to costly MDM projects as it provides:

Non-Intrusive Exploitation of Master Data Assets

The independent data layer CloudView creates provides a non-intrusive platform for developing business applications with master data. It supports rapid prototyping and iterative development without impacting data production or data quality.

• An instant federated view of data, substituting 'virtual' for physical data consolidation
• A simple, effective tool for identifying - and preventing - data anomalies
• A single, structured data layer for search, information access and other business applications

A Realistic Alternative for Today's Cloud Environment

In fact, even for some larger organizations, CloudView may provide a practical alternative for achieving MDM objectives. Some organizations' IS ecosystems comprise very large data volumes (with the most valuable assets residing in unstructured form), and a large number of data sources, many of which are external Cloud resources like SaaS applications.

For such an organization, leveraging CloudView for MDM can be less expensive, faster, and more manageable than implementing a complex MDM system. In fact, in today's Cloud environment, constructing new applications directly off an MDM hub, or reengineering existing source applications to synchronize them with the MDM system, simply may not be possible, or only possible using highly complex (and costly) bridge structures.

To learn more, download our solutions brief, Exalead CloudView & Master Data Management (MDM): Use CloudView to Improve—and In Some Cases, Even Bypass—MDM. And to discover how Web-derived search technologies in general are bringing radical new agility to the enterprise, download our whitepaper, Achieving Business Agility with Search-Based Technologies.