Mastering Data Management

More in Business Process Management

• Improving Business Processes with MDM
• Mobility: Inventing the New Division of Labor
• Take Charge of your Data Environment: IBM Performance Management Solutions
• Top 5 InfoSphere Demos at IOD

More in MDM

• Top Books for your MDM Library
• Recent Reads: MDM & Data Governance
• Big Data Governance: A Framework
• Predictive Data Governance for Business Transformation

More from Lawrence Dubov

• MDM Vs Data Governance: History and 8 Predictions
• What’s Harder: Starting or Sustaining MDM?
• Conclusion: Quantifying Assets
• 3 Essential Questions for Data Quality: Benchmarks, Penalties & Latency

Share this Post

Recent Comments

• Lorraine Fernandes on Response: A Universal Identifier Isn’t a Silver Bullet
• Henrik Liliendahl Sørensen on Response: A Universal Identifier Isn’t a Silver Bullet
• Response: A Universal Identifier Isn’t a Silver Bullet | Mastering Data Management on 3 Best Practices in Identity Management

Multi-lingual requirements should be part of your MDM roadmap

Many of our blog readers are based beyond the United States, but even if they weren’t, we still must consider multi-lingual requirements.

The majority of master data management products have been developed in North America, and hence, English is the predominant language used by these MDM products.

When MDM is implemented in an environment where another language is important, this roadmap domain causes additional challenges. These challenges may result in additional implementation costs and risks. On global implementations multiple languages are used within a single program. This may also apply to bi-lingual countries like Canada.

There are a number of areas of complexity caused by multi-lingual requirements in MDM. Some of them include the following:

• Matching of records in different languages.
  • By default the majority of MDM products contain phonetic functions only for English and possibly a few other languages
  • The same applies to the list of equivalencies. For instance Rob is a likely nickname for Robert, Bill for William. Data hub libraries contain the lists of equivalencies in English. The most established libraries may not include similar equivalency libraries in Russian, Chinese, or Korean.
• Address information is commonly used for matching. The accuracy of matching algorithms and address standardization algorithms can significantly depend on the language
• The use of multiple character sets can create additional complications

As such, while planning your MDM roadmap, you must consider the potential to need to support other languages. Even if your company is now entirely US-based, that could easily change whether through growth or acquisitions.

Henrik Sørensen’s recent blog post included some good examples of this problem. Have you seen encountered other relevant examples?

This is part of a series, Building an MDM Roadmap. For other posts and a complete index, view the Table of Contents.