One of the big news this week was the detection of gravitational waves. The big thing about this huge step in science is that we now will be able to see things in space, we could not see before. These are things we have plenty of clues about, but we cannot measure them because they do not emit electromagnetic radiation and the light from them is absorbed or reflected by cosmic bodies or dust before it reaches our telescopes.
We have kind of the same in the MDM (Master Data Management) world. We know that there is such a thing called multi-domain Master Data Management but our biggest telescope, the Gartner magic quadrants, only until now clearly identified customer Master Data Management and product Master Data Management as latest touched in the post The Perhaps Second Most Important MDM Quadrant 2015 is Out.
Indeed, many MDM programmes that actually does encompass all MDM domains do split the efforts into traditional domains as customer, vendor and product with separate teams observing their part of the sky. It takes a lot to advocate for that despite vendors belongs to the buy side and customers belongs to the sell side of the organization, there are strong ties between these objects. We can detect gravity in terms of that a vendor and a customer can be the same real world entity and vendors and customers have the same basic structure being a party.
Products do behave differently depending on the industry where your organization belongs. You may make products utilizing raw materials you buy and transform into finished products you sell or/and you may buy and sell the same physical product as a distributor, retailer or other value adding node in the supply chain. In order to handle the drastic increased demand for product data related to eCommerce, PIM (Product Information Management) has been known for long and many organizations everywhere in supply chains have already established PIM capabilities inside their organization with or without and inside or outside product Master Data Management.
What we still need to detect is a good system for connecting the PIM portion of sell sides upstream and buy sides downstream in supply chains. Right now we only see a blurred galaxy of spreadsheets as examined in the post Excellence vs Excel.
Liliendahl on Data Quality 