As we journey through Traditionally, master data has focused on opened up new possibilities. Traditionally slow a digital era, traditional establishing a few attributes of a critical and selective master data can now be made Master Data Management business entity extracted from transactional more comprehensive, varied and insights- (MDM) is increasingly systems to create a high-quality version powered to provide a near real-time view of unable to serve emerging of the truth. A lot of time and money has critical business entities. This expanded view business and application been invested into this, primarily for driving not only supports quality business reporting requirements. There is consistency of business reporting. but can actually start supporting transactional digital applications, making real-time decisions a need to expand the This traditional approach has an increasingly by leveraging the “new” master data attributes. realm of master data limited impact in the digital age. The characteristics Master data now, more than ever before, to create value as of data are evolving rapidly and today’s business needs to be highly business outcome focused, business applications needs have become more granular and require adaptable and scalable across the enterprise. get a digital makeover. near real-time responses. Data is not simply confined to structured, internally-generated In this article, we look at how to evolve beyond a transactional data but now spans heterogeneous, traditional MDM to a “Digital Master”, an enterprise machine-generated, unstructured and also that is near real-time, analytically-powered and externally-sourced datasets. directly influences business transactions in a digital world. The end result is business processes The changing needs and evolving data, that consistently deliver tangible outcomes and combined with the advent of analytics, machine impacts, powered by these master entities. learning and cognitive technologies have Meet Your Digital Master 2