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- What system holds the truth?
- Which system(s) get notified when a change is made on one of the systems?
- If all systems need to be updated, then each system needs to know how to transform the data to be consumable by the each of the other systems which requires programming many transformations. In the extreme case the example above could take five transformations for each of the six systems making for a total of 30 transformation applications.
- How are the changes handled? In real time or in batch? If Quite often its in batch, what is and the latency between batch updates ? usually causes issues with business processes.
- The onus of transferring data between systems becomes a data integration nightmare where some systems have to spend a great deal of resources converting data so that it can be consumed by or received from other systems.
- How does the organization manage access to the data? Perhaps the Warehouse should get access to only a subset of the customer data or shouldn't get any level of access to the Credit Card Processing system.
The problem doesn't end with just the customer data ; other as other data such as product, inventory and employee data may need to be kept up to date on several systems as well:
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Additionally, MDM provides better control over data access or governance over DI. MDM can manage who can see what so in the federated example, perhaps perhaps the Warehouse Management system only has access to data stored in the Distribution and CRM systems. but the Accounting System has access to all systems. When the Warehouse Division looks up the master data record for its customer the Acme Company it may get a different result than Accounting Division since the Accounting Division has access or "scope" to Acme Company's information on all systems.
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