One of the terms on the move on the Gartner Hype Cycle for Information Governance and Master Data Management is Multienterprise MDM.

Doing Master Data Management (MDM) enterprise wide is hard enough. The ability to control master data across your organization is essential to enable digitalization initiatives and ensure the competitiveness of your organization in the future.

But it does not stop there. Increasingly every organization will be an integrated part of a business ecosystem where collaboration with business partners will be a part of digitalization and thus we will have a need for working on the same foundation around master data.

The different master data domains will have different roles to play in such endeavors. Party master will be shared in some degree but there are both competitive factors, data protection and privacy factors to be observed as well.

Product master data – or product information if you like – is an obvious master data domain where you can gain business benefits from extending master data management to be ecosystem wide. This includes:

• Working with the same product classifications or being able to continuously map between different classifications used by trading partners
• Utilizing the same attribute definitions (metadata around products) or being able to continuously map between different attribute taxonomies in use by trading partners
• Sharing data on product relationships (available accessories, relevant spare parts, updated succession for products, cross-sell information and up-sell opportunities)
• Having access to latest versions of digital assets (text, audio, video) associated with products

The concept of ecosystem wide Multi-Domain MDM is explored further in this article about Master Data Share.