The MDM Institute‘s strategic planning assumptions attempt to answer the question “What does next-generation MDM look like?”

As Master Data Management (MDM) moves beyond a technology strategy to a mass market business strategy existing MDM stacks are struggling to adapt quickly enough to meet market demands. This is opening the door for smaller, agile organisations to plug the holes in these large stacks.

Data governance is one such area.

Traditionally, MDM stack’s approach to data governance has been to provide a workflow to allow Master Data Stewards to manually resolve and approve changes to master data. This reactive approach is labour-intensive and inefficient.

The report suggests that Enterprise Data Governance will be the phase 1 deliverable for most MDM projects. Active data governance requires a new way of thinking for most MDM vendors (along with new technologies) and may be better serviced by a specialist Data Governance Platform.

Reference Data Management

Reference data governance is another area where MDM can drive gain rapid value.

Mistakes in reference data are easy to overlook and can have devastating consequences as they propagate across the organisation. For many organisations, reference data management may add more value, more quickly, than full MDM, and should be combined with data governance as a starting point for enterprise MDM.

Multi-Domain MDM

The trend towards multi-domain, process-centric MDM continues to grow as projects shift from tactical to enterprise deployments.

The challenge for traditional customer or product-centric MDM solutions will be to adapt their architectures in order to handle new subject areas. In many cases, vendors may have multiple competing products for different domains and will have to figure out how to marry these disparate solutions into a single, unified approach.

MDM-as-a-Service

Another overarching theme is that of MDM as a service, either externally or internally hosted. Demand for MDM as a service is expected to exceed demand for traditional MDM stacks within the next few years. At the same time, MDM is becoming mission-critical and issues of performance, availability and scalability must be addressed.