Supported hybrid MDM scenarios

IBM® InfoSphere® MDM supports several hybrid MDM scenarios, each of which requires certain supporting components to achieve them.

All hybrid MDM scenarios that are described apply only to the Individual and Organization (Party) domains. The domains are also commonly referred to as the Person and Org entity types.

Scenario 1: Your company managed master data attributes in the registry style (virtual MDM). Later the solution evolved to a point where it makes sense to manage master data attributes centrally (physical MDM). For example, in one scenario, your company might have been managing customer information in multiple source systems and have a registry (virtual MDM) implementation style to pull together a single view of your customer. In another example, your company might have acquired another company where and both organizations have MDM implementations that need to be brought together. In yet another scenario your company might be managing master data in multiple line-of-business specific MDM instances. In any of the previous examples, your business might now prefer to manage their master data in a centralized manner. In this case, physical MDM becomes the system of record for the management of that master data.

Before hybrid MDM, data is managed in virtual MDM. Hybrid MDM allows data to be managed by physical MDM.

Scenario 2: Your company wants to manage some master data attributes in the registry style (virtual MDM). However, it would like to have a persisted enterprise view of your party. The company also wants to further supplement the persisted enterprise view with additional, centrally managed attributes and services to maintain them (physical MDM).

You can store and manage most data in virtual MDM, but you can use physical MDM for additional attributes. These are called "supplemental attributes."

Scenario 3: Your company wants to eventually manage some master data attributes centrally (physical MDM), but you are not yet ready for that phase of your MDM initiative. You are managing master data in virtual MDM today and would like to write any client applications without having to face significant rework after you eventually leverage centrally managed, persisted attributes.

You can use the hybrid MDM APIs to access a single view of the data in a hybrid MDM implementation.

Scenario 4: Your company chose the registry style to implement an MDM solution. However, your data is such that there are many entities with thousands of members that match and form an entity. The view that you want to surface might also contain thousands of attributes. In order to improve the inquiry performance of these large entities, you decided to create a centralized, physical view of these entities so that retrieval of the entity view can be more efficient.

Note: Hybrid MDM capabilities are available with the Advanced Edition of InfoSphere MDM. In all hybrid MDM scenarios that are described where virtual and physical MDM capabilities coexist and are both actively used, data stewardship and probabilistic matching capabilities leverage virtual MDM technology. That is, all related Suspect Duplicate Processing configurations in physical MDM are disabled and not leveraged.