MDM: A Single Source of Truth for Your Enterprise Data

Regardless of how great your Business Intelligence (BI) tool is, bad data will result in bad reports.  Bad reports eventually become, sometimes all too quickly, untrusted reports.  BI Implementations sometimes get a bad reputation due to something that cannot be inherently controlled – enterprise data quality.

Managing the quality of your data at an enterprise level will help tie the numbers together across systems, as detailed in this article from The Data Warehouse Institute (TDWI).  A Master Data Management (MDM) solution provides one source of truth for your enterprise reference data and dimensions.

That clean, consistent data can, and should, be shared with as many enterprise systems as possible.  Spread the good word, or in this case, the good data!  The result is that management gets the same story in the form of clear, consistent numbers from multiple people in multiple departments.  In this way, MDM can bolster confidence in, and adoption of, BI in all corners of the organization – management, the business, and IT.