Making sense of the Master Data Management (MDM) concept: old wine in new bottles or new wine in old bottles?

Abstract

This paper presents an insight into the emerging concept of master data management (MDM) and highlights issues that both academics and business managers should consider to better understand the meaning of this ‘hot topic’. This critical reflection paper is forward-looking and uses the concept of the knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) process to present an abstracted view of the potential steps constituting an organisation’s business intelligence (BI) initiative, in an effort to make sense of the MDM concept. We argue that MDM is effectively data warehousing branded with enterprise resource planning (ERP) market rhetoric and contains an added repository of ‘master data’. Furthermore, we view an organisational implementation of MDM as another attempt at data quality/integration due to the failure of previous data warehousing, and ERP and ERPII initiatives within the organisation. Finally, we argue that more research should be conducted to fully appreciate the true meaning of the concept of MDM.