Master Data Management (MDM) is the discipline of building a single, trustworthy record for an organisation's core entities — things like "customer," "product," or "supplier." But an MDM project launched without the right questions answered can burn through budget and your team's time fast. Here are five questions to answer before you begin.
1. Which data is actually "master" data?
Not all corporate data is master data. Transactional data (an order's date, an invoice's amount) needs to be kept separate from master data (a customer ID, a product code). Projects that start without a clear scope tend to start treating every table as "master data" over time, and become unmanageable.
2. Who owns the data?
What matters isn't who technically produces the data, but who on the business side is accountable for its accuracy. In MDM projects run without an assigned Data Steward, there's no authority to decide which of two conflicting records is the correct one.
3. How will deduplication rules be defined?
The same customer might have three differently-written records — one in the CRM, one in billing, one in the e-commerce platform. Deciding which rule (name similarity, tax ID, email) merges these records is the most time-consuming step of the project, and also the most critical.
4. How will changes flow back to source systems?
MDM isn't just about building a central record — it's about keeping that record current. You need to define upfront how often, and by what method, a correction made in the master data layer gets reflected back to the source systems (or at least to the reporting layer).
5. How will we measure success?
Rather than abstract goals like "data quality improved," define measurable metrics: the duplicate customer record rate, the number of manual correction requests, or the number of inconsistencies between reports. Otherwise, even a completed project leaves its success open to debate.
Conclusion
MDM is less a matter of technology than of process and accountability. At Vera Teknoloji, we start every MDM project by working through these five questions with the business units first, and only bring in the technical setup once that clarity is in place.