I noticed an interesting blog post by Andrew Brooks about a possible side effect of the credit crunch, that of an increasing interest in MDM and data quality by recruiters. This may sound paradoxical, but it makes sense. Companies struggle to get good management information (for example about levels of counterparty risk for trading organisations such as investment banks) due to inconsistent master data across multiple systems. When times are booming this may be glossed over, but with prestigious companies going to the wall on a daily basis, being certain of the information that you rely on gets a higher priority. The blog resonated with me since I have just had a couple of recruitment agencies call me in the last few days asking what this “MDM thing is all about” in response to recent client inquiries.

Every major company I talk to struggles with getting reliable enterprise-wide data, and in every project I have been involved with, the data quality in corporate systems is worse than people think it is. If the current tough financial conditions prompt a new focus on fixing these issues, then indeed perhaps there will be a modest silver lining at the end of the credit crunch cloud.