Mastering Data Management

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Make sure your enterprise architect asks these key questions.

To help determine the best multidomain MDM approach for your organization, a business case analysis is essential. This involves understanding how the system will be used to create value for the company by improving specific business processes.

The business case analysis must always come first. And the first questions that the multidomain MDM enterprise architect needs to answer are:

• What are the specific business value propositions for these services?
• What are the interdependencies of the data being managed?

When defining the potential use cases for these services, the architect should try to be realistic about how data will be used now and in the future, and attempt to balance short- and long-term views, which can be a challenge.

For example, a business-to-business or a business-to-consumer company might want to build a multidomain MDM service that puts all customer data in one place and manage it to achieve incremental business value.

It might also want to identify opportunities to cross-sell and up-sell to increase revenue, or better move its product catalog to improve customer satisfaction and ensure that customers receive consistent pricing across all channels.

The goals for defining business use cases should be to avoid analyzing too many use cases that are unlikely to come to fruition, such as real-time tailored marketing, while not having too narrow a focus and thus overlooking likely use cases, such as providing consistent prices to customers.

Once the business use case portion of the multidomain MDM architecture analysis is complete, the next step is to conduct a more in-depth analysis of use cases and how they affect the proposed system. This analysis helps to ensure that overall system availability, scalability and reliability requirements are met for each potential business use.

Investing in the analysis upfront helps prevent unnecessary costs and re-engineering efforts later. This process is complex and requires a company to involve an experienced enterprise architect in the project. The architect will be capable of understanding the challenges, metrics and business use cases and, based on that information, be able to make the best architectural decision for the organization.

This post is part of Marty Moseley's Multidomain MDM Series. View the table of contents for links to any parts you may have missed.