InfoSphere MDM product overview

InfoSphere® MDM is a comprehensive suite of products and capabilities that you can use to manage the master data in your organization.

Introduction to master data and master data management

Companies frequently have difficulty achieving an accurate view of the key facts that affect the organization in non-customer-facing environments such as operations and finance because data about customers, locations, accounts, suppliers, and products can often be fragmented, incomplete, or inconsistent across organizations. InfoSphere MDM provides the features and flexibility needed to solve these issues.

  • Master data is a subset of all enterprise data. Master data is the high-value, core information used to support critical business processes across the enterprise. Master data is at the heart of every business transaction, application, and decision.
  • Master data management is a discipline that provides a consistent understanding of master data entities (for example, subscriber, policy, and so forth). It is a set of functionality that provides mechanisms and governance for the consistent use of master data across the organization. It is designed to accommodate, control, and manage change.

InfoSphere MDM addresses issues of fragmented, incomplete and inconsistent data with a central repository to store master data across the organization. InfoSphere MDM provides a consolidated, central view of an organization's key business facts and also provides the ability to manage master data throughout its lifecycle by integrating with each organization's specific business rules and processes for creating, verifying, maintaining, and deleting master data from the repository. InfoSphere MDM helps organizations realize the full benefit of their investments in customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and business intelligence (BI) systems, as well as integration tools and data warehouses.

Lifecycle of information

InfoSphere MDM is in the midst of the lifecycle of information, as shown in the following diagram:
Lifecycle diagram of InfoSphere MDM. The diagram shows how InfoSphere MDM is in the midst of other business activities: marketing and sales interactions, back-office systems, regulatory compliance, new product information, fraud avoidance, financial planning, billing, customer care, customer self-service. With InfoSphere MDM, you can optimize the business, understand choices and planning with the accurate information, ensure that all systems have consistent and complete information in real time, and maximize customer satisfaction and revenue opportunities.

Unified view

The following diagram shows how InfoSphere MDM pulls together information into a unified view across business processes, transactional systems, and analytical systems. InfoSphere MDM addresses key data issues such as governance, quality, and consistency. The MDM goals are as follows:
Manage
To manage your data. InfoSphere MDM manages your data from source systems such as business applications, databases, and content sources.
Govern
To provide data stewardship tools that help ensure quality and security. Data stewardship is essential for your MDM implementation.
Develop and integrate
To create custom applications and business processes. Each MDM implementation has different requirements; InfoSphere MDM provides the development tools to create custom applications and business processes.
Analyze
To analyze your data. Business intelligence applications help you to monitor and assess your master data and how it affects your business goals.
Overview diagram of InfoSphere MDM. The diagram shows how InfoSphere MDM helps you to manage, integrate, govern, and analyze your information.

The editions

InfoSphere MDM includes both transaction-oriented MDM and collaborative authoring and workflow capabilities to handle multiple domains, implementation styles, and use cases across various industries. To provide you with optimal coverage of their MDM solution requirements, InfoSphere MDM is offered in these editions:

  • Advanced Edition helps you to transform your organization through improved business processes and applications.
  • Standard Edition delivers business value for MDM projects with a quick time to value.
  • Collaborative Edition streamlines workflow activities across users who are involved in authoring and defining information.