Master Data Management

How can you govern your master data without knowing your master data? For many years I’ve been saying that the one thing all MDM clients have in common is that the quality of data in their source systems is not as good as they thought.  Over the past several years I’ve found that all MDM clients have a second thing in common: they are unaware of the quality of data in their MDM hub and they don’t know how the data is changing.  This is surprising since an MDM hub contains your most critical business data that is used in real-time processes and analytics across the organization.  How can you govern your data when you don’t know its trend in quality, how it is being used and how it is changing over time?   This is flying blind. There are a few contributing factors to this issue.  The first is that MDM products don’t provide capabilities to analyze and report on data.  The second is an MDM hub is not the appropriate place to do thi...

Web Services Overview: Web Services are services available over the web that enables communication and provide a standard protocol for communication. To enable the communication, we need a medium (HTTP) and a format (XML/JSON). There are two parties to the web services, namely Service Provider and Service Consumer. A web service provider develops/implements the application (web service) and makes it available over the internet (web).  Service Provider publishes an interface for the web services that describes all the attributes of the web service. Service Consumer consumes the web service. For the Consumer to consume the web service, the consumer has to know the services available, request and response parameters, how to call the services and so on. Hence we can define Web Service as a standardized way of integrating web desk applications using XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI open standards over an internet protocol backbone. XML is used to tag the data. SOAP is used to transfer t...