Master Data Management, or “MDM” is a process of ensuring that a business has accurate, syndicated data throughout its teams and systems. Take, for example, a customer’s email address. No matter which system you access, the email address should be the same, and consistent. If the customer changes their email address, that change should flow through the connected systems, so consistency is maintained.
The idea of Master Data is that there is one system for each data class which has supremacy, and from which all other systems take their copies. For each data class, a data-synch operation is needed to copy data to each of the other systems. For 4 data classes, and 3 systems then 8 data-synch operations are needed – and these should run continuously to ensure accurate and timely data throughout the enterprise.
WHY YOU DON’T NEED MASTER DATA MANAGEMENT IN IT OPERATIONS
- Your teams run completely independently. There’s no need to share data with other teams, because each system is run completely independently
- You are a small business. It’s easy to get the data you need, when you can reach over the corridor to the person with the right data. Or perhaps you have logins to all the systems, and you can get all the data you need quickly.
- Things don’t change much. Of course, it’s all about change. There’s no need to synch data continuously if it doesn’t change!
WHEN YOU DO NEED MASTER DATA MANAGEMENT IN IT OPERATIONS
- Your business is large, and growing. It’s impractical, insecure, and bad practice to grant everyone access to all systems. Instead, you need to make sure that the data your teams need is available in their systems, when they need it.
- When you’re looking to improve productivity. Specifically, tasks like customer onboarding, offboarding, upgrading, or managing change processes – you need to push data through your systems quickly, reliably and repeatably.
- When customer services are impacted. Ever been emailing the wrong client, or lost track of configuration? This is classically a failure of systems to co-ordinate.
MASTER DATA MANAGEMENT for IT Operations is a sophisticated function, that is particularly relevant to Managed Service Providers managing a larger number of clients, and using a relatively complex IT toolchain. That toolchain could include CRM, Monitoring, ITSM, Backup, SIEM, SOAR and many others.
Your options are:
- rely on point-to-point integration from the vendors. This is a reasonable first step – but often limited to the vendors’ definition, and often these are single direction integrations too.
- Adopt a Master Data Management approach, such as ConnectMagic from Panoramic Data. This would enable you to have full control over your data management, and enable you to fully automate your customer lifecycle.