Yesterday, when I wrote about future trends in master data management, I referred to a recent Information Management article by Marty Mosely, which warned the business needs should determine which architectural style you use for multidomain master data management.

Moseley, the CTO for Initiate Systems, examined at the pros and cons of the three multidomain MDM styles – registry models, hybrids and centralized models. He also wrote a piece explaining how MDM can be used to support various business goals, which appeared in the July issue of Information Management.

Both of these articles offer fine advice, but maybe you noticed there's a little something missing in between the two. After you read how MDM can address business goals in general, wouldn't it be nice to determine what multidomain master data management can do for your business in particular before you move on to MDM architecture?

As it turns out, Mosely recently wrote another piece on this very topic for our CTO Edge site. And since I missed it in yesterday's post, I wanted to point it out today.

In “Multidomain MDM: Make Sure You Do the Homework First,” Moseley looks at two questions enterprise architects should address before they start multidomain MDM – or, I would venture to add, any type MDM:

• What's the business case?
• How is multidomain going to affect everything else – or, as he more eloquently puts it, “What are the interdependencies of the data being managed?”

The first question is not as simple as it might seem – which is pretty much always the case with business use cases, isn't it? It'll be tempting to think of every possible use case and hope one works out, but Moseley warns against this:

The goals for defining business use cases should be to avoid analyzing too many use cases that are unlikely to come to fruition, such as real-time tailored marketing, while not having too narrow a focus and thus overlooking likely use cases, such as providing consistent prices to customers.

Once  you've figured out the use cases, Moseley lists five types of analysis -- transaction, volumetric, complexity, availability and stability -- you should perform to help you determine which architectural style you'll need to deploy. That brings us full circle to Moseley's Information Management piece on the pros and cons of multidomain MDM architectures.