Master Data Management from a primary focuses on creating a consistent view of the data across the organization or a company and manage the data change also consistently. To get to this consistent view, the data needs to be deciphered and siphoned from various data sources. However one of the major issues in deciphering this data is that almost 80% of this enterprise information is in unstructured.

What is unstructured data?
Unstructured data is any data like the blog that you are reading now which cannot be typically stored in a database in a row/column format. It will be done in the form of a BLOB (binary large object). With the boom of the internet and the World Wide Web this data is growing at a mind boggling speed. A lot of government and financial organization still has a document oriented systems wherein there will be different forms that will be filled and maintained.

Being able to pull the content and the data together to create a single view is the biggest challenge. Master content of an MDM solution can be effectively managed by integrating with an intelligent tool which can manage the content intelligently and optimize all business process. IBM Enterprise Content Management is a product which can do all these. Integrating this with an MDM solution will give a complete 360 degree view of the data and the content to effectively manage and analyze any business.

Take an example of an insurance company which has considerable amount of content in terms of insurance policies and their terms and agreement. As mentioned earlier lot of this unstructured information is also captured as feedbacks and blogs from customers which is also very important for the company’s satisfaction metrics. The same company now wants to implement an MDM Solution to give him a unified view of its customers to effectively manage his business. It would be difficult to move the content based unstructured data into an MDM solution. The company would not want to loose these feedbacks and would definitely want to have these views whenever it is looking at a specific customer profile.

MCB (Master Content Bridge) is aimed at providing this unified view by integrating IBM Enterprise Content Management and InfoSphere Master Data Management Server. It would enable the following:-

1. Mapping document and their attributes to corresponding MDM parties and attributes

2. Capture document creation and change events as they occur
– Synchronize master content metadata into MDM server
– Create linkage between MDM parties and documents

3. Initial load and linkage of existing documents in ECM in bulk

4. User interfaces and applications consuming MDM services have access to structured and unstructured data.

MCB would thus help in bringing to the table a complete true value of MDM solution for a customer and providing the power of enterprise content to single view.

More information at the link-
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/infosphere/mdm_server/master-content.html