Master Data Management (MDM) is a growing discipline companies are

adopting to define, organize, and view a cohesive set of key business facts, or

master data, about their organization in order to better understand the facts

that drive their business. This approach is not new. It has most recently has

been the focus of two initiatives; Customer Data Integration (CDI) and Product

Information Management (PIM). These initiatives are focused on uniting

customer data and product data, respectively, across the enterprise to bring

a single version of the truth to data which is impeded by information silos.

While CDI and PIM are subsets of MDM, MDM is more than the sum of these

two parts. MDM has broader capabilities including: creating and managing

additional data domains; recognizing and managing the relationships among

domains; and managing the overall master data lifecycle. Clients run the risks

of building silos of MDM solutions and potentially inverting the silo problem

they have today, if they fail to understand these broader MDM capabilities.

Therefore, it is important to choose an experienced vendor like IBM, who can

provide a Master Data Management platform which will steer clients away from

these risks.

IBM takes a bro