MDM is the concept of managing those "reference data" lookups that seem to plague all organizations. Things like department structures, organizational and accounting hierarchies, product identifiers, campaign codes, application identifiers... anything which gets stored in a database, and a spreadsheet, and an email, and another spreadsheet, and then back into a database, then out to a reporting tool, then out to a spreadsheet, then out to Powerpoint, then out to an exec who says the data is all wrong and to start over.
You get the idea?
MDM is supposed to solve this problem. However, unlike all of these redundant "backups" of master data on various employee desktops, MDM could have the problem of Central Point of Failure, and this One Version of The Truth can quickly become worthless bytes on a disk if trust is lost in the accuracy of data.
Ownership, or Stewardship in this case makes a lot of sense. Good article around MDM follows.
Data Stewardship is a key success factor – MDM systems make data quality and accuracy more important than ever because a mistake in master data can cause issues in all the systems that consume the data. While automated match-merge, standardization and data quality tools are becoming more capable all the time, at some point real human beings who are passionate about the data are required to make decisions that tools can make and monitor the processes to ensure that business rules and data standards are being enforced correctly. This is just one more example of the people aspects of MDM being as important as the technology. While processes, policies, governance, and standards are the real success factors, a good MDM hub can provide tools and capabilities that make a data steward’s job easier. Some of the more useful capabilities are business rule enforcement, workflow, versioning, searching, auditing, and eventing. The combination of the Microsoft MDM system and SharePoint supplies all of these capabilities and more.
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