Henry Morris Data Quotations

Maintaining a single view of products, customers, locations, and financial accounts is a significant challenge. At its heart, master data management involves changing, consolidating, and rationalizing core processes such as new product introduction or customer (or patient/citizen/supplier) registration and ongoing management. The greatest complexity comes from these business process changes and process integration issues, over and above the data integration requirements.

MDM really is centered around the capability to coordinate operations, in addition to reporting. MDM has been around for years, but using master data for specific domains, such as customers, products or financial accounts, is giving rise to Applied MDM and Infrastructure MDM.

MDM reaches across a number of areas, where functional units within an organization need to share data on products, customers, locations, etc., across multiple systems. As companies gather more data, and have to make it usable for CRM and compliance purposes, they encounter increasing difficulties and questions. What data is correct? Who is responsible for it? Who maintains the information?

The XML approach will provide the lingua franca for getting at various types of data; it is providing a sort of structure for unstructured data. The question is how much of this unstructured data is going to be in XML. It will be a small part relative to the total amount of unstructured data that is in a company.

An innovative and noteworthy feature of Hyperion System 9 is integrated master data management.

The business and IT challenges associated with the ongoing management of master data have plagued companies for years, ... Organizations finding success with Hyperion's master data management technology illustrate the fact that with proper planning and discipline significant progress can be made and measurable benefits achieved.