Gone are the days when doing business meant doing so only within the borders of the organization. What used to be single-source data is now multi-source.
Today’s business world is comprised not only of disparate systems and groups, but users as well; open networks with business partners, customers and suppliers; and diverse architectures and business functions, not to mention global outsourcing and off-shoring efforts.
The net? Every link is an exposure and every data element is a risk. In short, business today means your network is the enterprise. Like any dynamic entity, your organization—along with its data—changes daily. And as the data (whether structured or unstructured), is aggregated and consolidated, to successfully leverage the data across the organization, it must be treated as an enterprise asset.
This is especially important for master data, the key business facts used across multiple business applications.
Yet, for many organizations with data-sharing environments, complex silos and isolated stovepipes of information and systems hinder business responsiveness and decision makers’ ability to make informed decisions. Collaboration among users, functions and systems is often fraught with few clear-cut roles and responsibilities for protecting or enhancing data. Challenges like these illustrate why data governance has emerged as a strategic priority for organizations of all sizes.
This white paper will describe how engaging in a master data management (MDM) project enables effective governance of data—specifically master data—and achieves maturity in key categories of the IBM Data Governance Maturity Model.
