Extended MDM Revisited

Master Data Management (MDM) continues to scale as explored in the post about how MDM inflates.

One inflating trend can be named Extended MDM, which is about taking other data domains than the traditional customer, supplier, and product domains under the MDM umbrella and thus creating a governed data hub.

Which entities that will be is industry specific. Examples from retail are warehouses, stores, and the equipment within those. Examples from pharma are own and affiliated plants, hospitals and other served medical facilities. Examples from manufacturing are plants, warehouses as well as the products, equipment and facilities where the produced products are used within.

Extended MDM can be seen as a twin discipline to a data hub strategy with the twist that the MDM approach adds governance to reflecting, integrating, and meshing critical application in a centralized fashion. This trend was touched in the post MDM Terms on the Move in the Gartner Hype Cycle with reference to the latest Hype Cycle for Data and Analytics Governance and Master Data Management.

The digital twin concept is another trend that, so to speak, is a twin of the Extended MDM trend. You can view all the traditional objects (domains) in MDM and the new to come as digital twins as explained in the post 4 Concepts in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Digital Business Capabilities that will Shape MDM.

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