Master Data projects always start with best intentions, but as with any modeling activity, we forget the limitations of models (abstractions for convenience) and the models themselves become our enemy, restricting general business agility. These are high-profile, high-cost, high-risk project; it’s worth pausing to take stock, what is it we actually want to accomplish.

In short, MDM is about “shared-understanding”, between humans, systems, and more recently – infrastructure (DevOps) and devices (IoT). We want to interoperate freely for improved visibility, decision-making and automation with the least effort to deploy and maintain. As our environments become dynamic, distributed and diverse organizations are under pressure to solve this increasingly complex problem.

Dave will make the case for a more flexible/adaptive form of master data management and will describe an information fabric with loosely-coupled elements, relationships and policies in a dynamically curated environment where links and tags support automated interoperability, flexible perspectives and non-disruptive change.