Your enterprise needs to ensure that your users and systems have a total, trusted, unified view of your customer data. Cloud Pak for Data as a Service provides the platform and tools to create a consolidated view of customers by connecting data across domains and presenting that data in interactive dashboards.
Watch this video to see the data fabric use case for implementing a solution in Cloud Pak for Data.
This video provides a visual method to learn the concepts and tasks in this documentation.
Challenges
To provide a trusted and unified view of customer data, organizations need to tackle these challenges:
Connecting key sources of customer data
Rather than repeatedly collecting data, organizations need to connect to key sources of customer data at the time of analysis.
Breaking down silos
Organizations need to bring together disparate data into a single, integrated view of customers.
Creating a complete customer profile
Teams need to build accurate views of customers at scale, quickly, to optimize self-service processes and data stewardship.
Making the data available for users
Data engineers need to be able to publish customer data to a single catalog where all users who need to consume the data have self-service access to it.
You can solve these challenges by implementing a trusted and unified view of customer data with data fabric on Cloud Pak for Data as a Service.
Example: Golden Bank's challenges
Follow the story of Golden Bank, which is running a campaign to offer lower mortgage rates. The bank needs a consolidated view of customer data combined with credit score data to see the complete picture before offering mortgages to customers.
Process
To implement a Master Data Management use case, your organization can follow this process:
- Configure a consolidated view of your customers
- Explore a consolidated view of your customers
- Share the data
The IBM Match 360 and IBM Knowledge Catalog services in Cloud Pak for Data as a Service provide all of the tools and processes that your organization needs to implement a Master Data Management solution.
1. Configure a consolidated view of your customers
In this first step of the process, data engineers can configure a consolidated view of your customers by combining data from disparate sources, generating and refining a data model, and mapping the data into the data model.
| What you can use | What you can do | Best to use when |
|---|---|---|
| IBM Match 360 | With the configuration tools in IBM Match 360, data engineers can gather customer data from different systems across your enterprise and view an automatically generated customizable data model without manually mapping thousands of attributes. After your data is loaded into IBM Match 360, data engineers can run a matching algorithm to create enriched master data entities. |
You want to use an intelligent matching algorithm that you can tune and train to establish a single, trusted, consolidated view of data. |
| Data Virtualization | Query many data sources as one. Data engineers can create virtual data tables that can combine, join, or filter data from various relational data sources. Data engineers can then make the resulting combined data available as data assets in IBM Knowledge Catalog. For example, you can use the combined data to feed dashboards, notebooks, and flows so that the data can be explored. |
You need to combine data from multiple sources to generate views. You need to make combined data available as data assets in a catalog. |
Example: Configuring Golden Bank's consolidated view of customers
Data engineers at Golden Bank combine customer data from different systems across your enterprise, as well as external data, with credit score data to resolve entities and create a consolidated view of the customers. The engineers set up and add assets to the master data, map the data asset attributes, publish the data model, and run the matching algorithm to prepare the data to be explored.
2. Explore a consolidated view of your customers
Data analysts and other business users explore the matched data.
| What you can use | What you can do | Best to use when |
|---|---|---|
| Master data explorer | With the master data explorer in IBM Match 360, users and systems search, view, and analyze master data entities. Users can discover master data directly in the space where they expect to consume it. |
Users and systems need a total view of your data. Users and systems need to search, view, and analyze master data entities. You want to use APIs to connect your business applications to trusted master data. |
Example: Exploring Golden Bank's consolidated view of customers
After the Golden Bank data engineers have configured a consolidated view of customers by combining cusomer data with credit score data, data analysts analyze, explore, and validate the results in IBM Match 360 to identify and select the best qualifying customers to target for marketing campaign offers.
Tutorials for Master Data Management
| Tutorial | Description | Expertise for tutorial |
|---|---|---|
| Configure a 360-degree view | Set up, map, and model your data to create a consolidated view of your customers. | Use the Match 360 drag and drop interface to configure your consolidated view. |
Learn more
Parent topic: Use cases