Anyone who has experience with corporate data, reporting, analytics and business process improvement knows that clean, accurate master data is the oil that makes a business run smoothly. Crummy master data breaks down the corporate engine, clogging it up until it behaves like a complex monstrosity. If you clean out that data sludge, it provides the lubrication to help things run together effectively.
That's the intention, anyway. A problem I've seen again and again is that once a master data initiative achieves the post-production steady-state (assuming you're that fortunate), most folks ring the victory bell and disperse to other projects. But wait --- the cleaned, lubricating data oil is yet not in the corporate engine. The data is still stuck in the Master Data Management database (assuming it's not an index-only MDM architecture).
To achieve a true 360-degree view of customer, supplier, and product data, the data oil must be re-integrated back into the appropriate business systems. Only then will it enable business processes to flow successfully. Most times, this is harder than the initial master data extraction and mastering. Perhaps that is why the majority of post-mastering re-integration projects are either left until the very end or not done at all.
MDM is a means to an end, not the end in itself. Vendors tend to sell MDM as "the end," not "the means," because they don't sell a post-deployment "solution." The post-deployment re-integration of data is treated like an extra bit of homework left to the student after class, when in reality this part of the project is the key to achieving the original goals.
Master data re-integration is the reason you embarked on your MDM project in the first place. Don't leave the master data in the MDM system. Get the clean data oil back into the corporate engine.
