imageThe recent emphasis on regulatory compliance, SOA and mergers and acquisitions has made the creating and maintaining of accurate and complete master data a business imperative.  IT is challenged with delivering high quality master data, creating, maintaining and delivering trusted versions of master data across their applications.

It’s no longer just about having a single version of the truth.  Master data services enables IT to deliver a single authoritative version of master data, while also making it easy for IT and end users to manage the data – and the data about the data; With capabilities like versioning, role security and hierarchy management, we make it easy to determine who made a change and when it was made while providing the ability to capture and modify hierarchies, independently of your underlying systems. 

With Master Data Services, Microsoft enable companies to deliver trusted data assets by aligning their systems to deliver consistent data throughout the organization.Poor data quality can be costly to organizations.  According to TDWI, Data Quality problems cost US businesses more than $600 billion a year.For the U.S. grocery industry alone, up to 1 percent of net revenue lost, and one in 2,000 of sales lost because the item was out of stock, were attributable to bad master data.

A common example of poor MDM is the scenario of a bank at which a customer has taken out a mortgage and the bank begins to send mortgage solicitations to that customer, ignoring the fact that the person already has a mortgage account relationship with the bank. This happens because the customer information used by the marketing section within the bank lacks integration with the customer information used by the customer services section of the bank. Thus the two groups remain unaware that an existing customer is also considered a sales lead.